10, 1^.: LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY PRINCETON. N. J. PRESENTED BY The V/idbw of G-eorge Dugan, '96 Division D_0_ dCo lb Section t-OkPn- ( ■ V.2 THE EXPOSITORS BIBLE EDITED BY THE REV. W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D. Editor of " The Expositor," etc. THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN MARCUS DODS, D.D. NEW YORK A. C, ARMSTRONG AND SON 51, EAST TENTH STREET 1S95 THE EXPOSITOR'S BIBLE. Crown Svo, cloth, price %\.<^oeach vol. First Series, 1887-8. Colossians. By A. Maclarhn, D.D. St, Mark. By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh. Genesis. By Prof. Marcus Dods, D.D 1 Samuel. By Prof. W. G. Blaikie, D.D. 2 Samuel. By the same Author, Hebrews. By Principal T.C. Edwards.D.D. Second Series, 1888-9. Gaiatians. By Prof. G. G. FiNDLAY, B.A. The Pastoral Epistles. By Rev. A. Plummer, D.D. Isaiah i. — xxxix. By Prof. G. A. Smith, D.D. Vol. I. The Book of Revelation. By Prof. W. MiLLlGAN, D.D. 1 Corinthians. By Prof. Marcus Dods, D.D. The Epistles of St. John. By Rt. Rev. W. Alkxandkr.D.D. Third Series, 1889-90. Judges and Ruth, By R. A. Watson, M.A., D.D. Jeremiah. By Rev. C. J. Ball, M.A. Isaiah xl. — lxvi. By Prof. G. A. Smith, D.D. Vol. II. St. Matthew. By Rev. J. Monro Gibson, D.D. Exodus. By Very Rev. the Dean of Armagh. St. Luke. By Rev. H. Burton, M.A. Fourth Series, 1890-1. Ecclesiastes. By Rev. Samuel Cox, D.D. St. James and St. Jude. By Rev. A. Plummkr, D.D. Proverbs. By Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. Leviticus, By Rev. S. H. Kellogg, D.D. The Gospel of St. John. By Prof. M. Dods, D.D. Vol. I. The Acts of the Apostles. By Prof. Stokes, D.D. Vol. I. Fifth Series, 1891-2. The Psalms, By A. Maclaren, D.D. Vol. I. 1 and 2 Thessalonians, By James Dennkv, D.D. The Book of Job- By R. A. Watson, M.A., D.D. Ephesians, By Prof. G. G. Findlav, B.A. The Gospel of St. John, By Prof. M. Dods, D.D. Vol.11. The Acts of the Apostles. By Prof. Stokks, D.D. Vol. II. Sixth Series, 1892-3. 1 Kings. By Ven. Archdeacon Farrar. Phiiippians. By Principal Rainy, D.D. Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. By Prof. W. F. Adeney, M.A. Joshua. By Prof. W. G. Blaikie, D.D. The Psalms, By A. Maclaren, D.D. Vol.11. The Epistles of St. Peter. By Prof Rawson Lumby, D.D. Seventh Series, 1893-4. 2 Kings. By Ven. Archdeacon Farrar, Romans. By H. C. G. MouLE, M.A. The Books of Chronicles. By Prof. W. H. Bennett, M.A. 2 Corinthians. By James Dennev, D.D. Numbers, By R. A. Watson, M.A., D.D. The Psalms, By A. Maclaren, D.D. Vol. III. eighth series, 1895-6. Daniel. By Ven. Archdeacon Farrar. The Book of Jeremiah. By Prof. W. H. Bennett, M.A. Deuteronomy, By Prof. .A.NDREW Harper, B.D. The Song of Solomon and Lamentations, By Prof. W. F. Adeney, M.A. Ezekiel. By Prof. John Skinner, M.A. The Minor Prophets, By Prof. G. A. Smith, D.D. Two Vols. OCT 191923 THE ^%(ggfAL Sl^g^^ GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN MARCUS T)ODS, D.D. PROFESSOR OF EXEGETICAL THEOLOGY, NEW COLLEGE, EDINBURGH In Two Volumes VOL. II. SECOND EDITION NEW YORK A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 51, EAST TENTH STREET 1S95 v> CONTENTS. I. PAGE The Anointing of Jesus ....... 3 II. The Entry into Jerusalem . . • . . . 19 , III. The Corn of Wheat 31 IV. The Attractive Force of the Cross . . , -47 V. Results of Christ's Manifestation . . . .65 VI. The Foot-Washing 75 VII. Judas . . 91 VIII. Jesus Announces His Departure 109 vi CONTENTS. IX. PAGE The Way, the Truth, and the Life . , . .123 X. The Father Seen in Christ . . , , , -137 XI. The Bequest of Peace > . . . . , -159 XII. The Vine and the Branches 175 XIII. Not Servants, but Friends ...„,. 193 XIV. The Spirit Christ's Witness . - . . . 205 XV. Last Words 229 XVI. Christ's Intercessory Prayer . . .' . . 247 XVII. The Arrest 263 XVIII. Peter's Denial and Repentance 281 XIX. Jesus Before Pilate . 299 CONTENTS. vii XX. Mary at the Cross . 321 XXI, The Crucifixion . . . „ . . , .335 XXII. iHE Resurrection 351 XXIII. Thomas' Test 365 XXIV. Appearance at Sea of Galilee 383 XXV. Restoration of Peter ....... 399 XXVI. Conclusion 413 I. THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. vol,. II. "Jesus therefore six days before the Passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus raised from the dead. So they made Him a supper there : and Martha served ; but Lazarus was one of them that sat at meat with Him. Mary therefore took a pound of ointment of spikenard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped His feet with her hair : and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of His disciples, which should betray Him, saith, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor ? Now this he said, not because he cared for the poor ; but because he was a thief, and having the bag took away what was put therein. Jesus therefore said, Suffer her to keep it against the day of My burying. For the poor ye have always with you ; but Me ye have not always. The common people therefore of the Jews learned that He was there : and they came, not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom He had raised from the dead. But the chief priests took counsel that they might put Lazarus also to death ; because that by reason of him many of the Jews went away, and believed on Jesus." — John xii. i-ii. THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. THIS twelfth chapter is the watershed of the Gospel. The self-manifestation of Jesus to the world is now ended ; and from this point onwards to the close we have to do with the results of that manifestation. He hides Himself from the unbelieving, and allows their unbelief full scope ; while He makes further disclosures to the faithful few. The whole Gospel is a systematic and wonderfully artistic exhibition of the manner in which the deeds, words, and claims of Jesus produced, — on the one hand, a growing belief and enthusiasm ; on the other, a steadily hardening unbelief and hostility. In this chapter the culmination of these processes is carefully illustrated by three incidents. In the first of these incidents evidence is given that there was an intimate circle of friends in whose love Jesus was embalmed, and His work and memory insured against decay ; while the very deed which had riveted the faith and affection of this intimate circle is shown to have brought the antagonism of His enemies to a head. In the second incident the writer shows that on the whole popular mind Jesus had made a profound im- pression, and that the instincts of the Jewish people acknowledged Him as King. In the third incident the influence He was destined to have and was already THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. to some extent exerting beyond the bounds of Judaism is illustrated by the request of the Greeks that they might see Jesus. In this first incident, then, is disclosed a devotedness of faith which cannot be surpassed, an attachment which is absolute ; but here also we see that the hostility of avowed enemies has penetrated even the inner circle of the personal followers of Jesus, and that one of the chosen Twelve has so little faith or love that he can see no beauty and find no pleasure in any tribute paid to his Master. In this hour there meet a ripeness of love which suddenly reveals the permanent place which Jesus has won for Himself in the hearts of men, and a maturity of alienation which forebodes that His end cannot be far distant. In this beautiful inci- dent, therefore, we turn a page in the gospel and come suddenly into the presence of Christ's death. To this death He Himself freely alludes, because He sees that things are now ripe for it, that nothing short of His death will satisfy His enemies, while no further mani- festation can give Him a more abiding place in the love of His friends. The chill, damp odour of the tomb first strikes upon the sense, mingling with and absorbed in the perfume of Mary's ointment. If Jesus dies. He cannot be forgotten. He is embalmed in the love of such disciples. On His way to Jerusalem for the last time Jesus reached Bethany "six days before the Passover" — that is to say, in all probability^ on the Friday evening previous to His death. It was natural that He should wish to spend His last Sabbath in the congenial and ' It is uncertain whether the "six days" are inclusive or exdusive of the day of arrival and of the first day of the Feast. It is also uncertain on what day of the week the Crucifixion happened. xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. S Strengthening society of a family whose welcome and whose affection He could rely upon. In the little town of Bethany He had become popular, and since the raising of Lazarus He was regarded with marked veneration. Accordingly they made Him a feast, which, as Mark informs us, was given in the house of Simon the leper. Any gathering of His friends in Bethany must have been incomplete without Lazarus and his sisters. Each is present, and each contributes an appropriate addition to the feast. Martha serves ; Lazarus, mute as he is throughout the whole story, bears witness by his presence as a living guest to the worthiness of Jesus ; while Mary makes the day memorable by a characteristic action. Coming in, apparently after the guests had reclined at table, she broke an alabaster of very costly spikenard^ and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair. This token of affection took the company by sur- prise. Lazarus and his sisters may have been in sufficiently good circumstances to admit of their making a substantial acknowledgment of their indebtedness to Jesus ; and although this alabaster of ointment had cost as much as would keep a labouring man's family for a year, this could not seem an excessive return to make for service so valuable as Jesus had rendered. It was the manner of the acknowledgment which took the company by surprise. Jesus was a poor man, and His very appearance may have suggested that there were other things He needed more urgently than such ' In The Classical Review for July iSgo Mr, Bennett suggests that the difficult word Tn.aTi.Kris should be written Trttrra^-^s, and that it refers to the Pistacia terehinthus, which grows in Cyprus and Judaea, and yields a very fragrant and very costly unguent. THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. a gift as this. Had the family provided a home for Him or given Him the price of this ointment, no one would have uttered a remark. But this was the kind of demonstration reserved for princes or persons of great distinction ; and when paid to One so conspicu- ously humble in His dress and habits, there seemed to the uninstructed eye something incongruous and bordering on the grotesque. When the fragrance of the ointment disclosed its value, there was therefore an instantaneous exclamation of surprise, and at any rate in one instance of blunt disapproval. Judas, instinctively putting a money value on this display of affection, roundly and with coarse indelicacy declared it had better have been sold and given to the poor. Jesus viewed the act with very different feelings. The rulers were determining to put Him out of the way, as not only worthless but dangerous-; the very man who objected to this present expenditure was making up 'his mind to sell Him for a small part of the sum ; the people were scrutinising His conduct, criticising Him; — in the midst of all this hatred, sus- picion, treachery, coldness, and hesitation comes this woman and puts aside all this would-be wisdom and caution, and for herself pronounces that no tribute is rich enough to pay to Him. It is the rarity of such action, not the rarity of the nard, that strikes Jesus. This, He says, is a noble deed she has done, far rarer, far more difficult to produce, far more penetrating and lasting in its fragrance than the richest perfume that man has compounded. Mary has the experience that all those have who for Christ's sake expose themselves to the misunderstanding and abuse of vulgar and unsympathetic minds ; she receives from Himself more explicit assurance that her offering has given pleasure xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. 7 to Him and is gratefully accepted. We may sometimes find ourselves obliged to do what we perfectly well know will be misunderstood and censured ; we may be compelled to adopt a line of conduct which seems to convict us of heedlessness and of the neglect of duties we owe to others ; we may be driven to action which lays us open to the charge of being romantic and extravagant ; but of one thing we may be perfectly sure — that however our motives are mis-read and con- demned by those who first make their voices heard, He for whose sake we do these things will not disparage our action nor misunderstand our motives. The way to a fuller intimacy with Christ often lies through passages in life we must traverse alone. But we are probably more likely to misunderstand than to be misunderstood. We are so limited in our sympathies, so scantily furnished with knowledge, and have so slack a hold upon great principles, that for the most part we can understand only those who are like ourselves. When a woman comes in with her effusive- ness, we are put out and irritated ; when a man whose mind is wholly uneducated utters his feelings by shout- ing hymns and dancing on the street, we think him a semi-lunatic ; when a member of our family spends an hour or two a day in devotional exercises, we condemn it as waste of time which might be better spent on practical charities or household duties. Most liable of all to this vice of misjudging the actions of others, and indeed of misapprehending generally wherein the real value of life consists, are those who, like Judas, measure all things by a utilitarian, if not a money, standard. Actions which have no imme- diate results are pronounced by such persons to be jnere sentiment and waste, while in fact they redeem THE GOSPElL OF ST. JOHN. human nature and make life seem worth living. The charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava served none of the immediate purposes of the battle, and was indeed a blunder and waste from that point of view ; yet are not our annals enriched by it as they have been by few victories ? On the Parthenon there were figures placed with their backs hard against the wall of the pediment ; these backs were never seen and were not intended to be seen, but yet were carved with the same care as was spent upon the front of the figures. Was that care waste ? There are thousands of persons in our own society who think it essential to teach their children arithmetic, but pernicious to instil into their minds a love of poetry or art. They judge of education by the test, Will it pay ? can this attainment be turned into money ? The other question, Will it enrich the nature of the child and of the man ? is not asked. They proceed as if they believed that the man is made for business, not business for the man ; and thus it comes to pass that everywhere among us men are found sacrificed to business, stunted in their moral develop- ment, shut off from the deeper things of life. The pursuits which such persons condemn are the very things which lift life out of the low level of common- place buying and selling, and invite us to remember that man liveth not by bread alone, but by high thoughts, by noble sacrifice, by devoted love and all that love dictates, by the powers of the unseen, mightier by far than all that we see. In the face, then, of so much that runs counter to such demonstrations as Mary's and condemns them as extravagance, it is important to note the principles upon which our Lord proceeds in His justification of her action. xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. 9 First, He says, this is an occasional, exceptional tribute. " The poor always ye have with you, but me ye have not always." Charity to the poor you may- continue from day to day all your life long : whatever you spend on me is spent once for all. You need not think the poor defrauded by this expenditure. Within a few days I shall be beyond all such tokens of regard, and the poor will still claim your sympathy. This principle solves for us some social and domestic pro- blems. Of many expenses common in society, and especially of expenses connected with scenes such as this festive gathering at Bethany, the question always arises. Is this expenditure justifiable ? When present at an entertainment costing as much and doing as little material good as the spikenard whose perfume had died before the guests separated, we cannot but ask, Is not this, after all, mere waste ? had it not been better to have given the value to the poor ? The hunger-bitten faces, the poverty-stricken outcasts, we have seen during the day are suggested to us by the superabundance now before us. The effort to spend most where least IS needed suggests to us, as to these guests at Bethany, gaunt, pinched, sickly faces, bare rooms, cold grates, feeble, dull-eyed children — in a word, starving families who might be kept for weeks together on what is here spent in a few minutes ; and the question is inevitable, Is this right ? Can it be right to spend a man's ransom on a mere good smell, while at the end of the street a widow is pining with hunger ? Our Lord replies that so long as one is day by day considering the poor and relieving their necessities, he need not grudge an occasional outlay to manifest his regard for his friends. The poor of Bethany would probably appeal to Mary much more hopefully than to Judas, and they would THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. appeal all the more successfully because her heart had been allowed to utter itself thus to Jesus. There is, of course, an expenditure for display under the guise of friendship. Such expenditure finds no justification here or any where • else. But those who in a practical way acknowledge the perpetual presence of the poor are justified in the occasional outlay demanded by friend- ship. 2. But our Lord's defence of Mary is of wider range. "Let her alone," He says, "against the day of my burying hath she kept this." It was not only occa- sional, exceptional tribute she had paid Him ; it was solitary, never to be repeated. Against my burial she has kept this unguent ; for me ye have not always. Would you blame Mary for spending this, were I lying in my tomb ? Would you call it too costly a tribute, were it the last? Well, it is the last.^ Such is our Lord's justification of her action. Was Mary herself conscious that this was a parting tribute ? It is possible that her love and womanly instinct had revealed to her the nearness of that death of which Jesus Himself so often spoke, but which the disciples refused to think of. She may have felt that this was the last time she would have an opportunity of expressing her devotion. Drawn to Him with unutterable tenderness, with admiration, gratitude, anxiety mingling in her heart, she hastens to spend upon Him her costliest. Passing away from her world she knows He is ; buried so far as she was concerned she knew Him to be if He was to keep the Passover at Jerusalem in the midst of His enemies. Had the others felt with her, none could have grudged her the last consolation of this utterance of her love, or ' So Stier. xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. II have grudged Him the consolation of receiving it. For this made Him strong to die, this among other motives — the knowledge that His love and sacrifice were not in vain, that He had won human hearts, and that in their affection He would survive. This is His true embalm- ing. This it is that forbids that His flesh see corruption, that His earthly manifestation die out and be forgotten. To die before He had attached to Himself friends as passionate in their devotion as Mary would have been premature. The recollection of His work might have been lost. But when He had won men like John and women like Mary, He could die assured that His name would never be lost from earth. The breaking of the alabaster box, the pouring out of Mary's soul in adora- tion of her Lord — this was the signal that all was ripe for His departure, this the proof that His manifestation had done its work. The love of His own had come to maturity and burst thus into flower. Jesus therefore recognises in this act His true embalming. And it is probably from this point of view that we may most readily see the appropriateness of that singular commendation and promise which our Lord, according to the other gospels, added : " Verily I say unto you, wherever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken for a memorial of her." At first sight the encomium might seem as extrava- gant as the action. Was there, a Judas might ask, anything deserving of immortality in the sacrifice of a few pounds ? But no such measurements are admis- sible here. The encomium was deserved because the act was the irrepressible utterance of all-absorbing love — of a love so full, so rich, so rare that even the ordinary disciples of Christ were at first not in perfect THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. sympathy with it. The absolute devotedness of her love found a fit symbol in the alabaster box or vase which she had to break that the ointment might flow out. It was not a bottle out of which she might take the stopper and let a carefully measured quantity dribble out, reserving the rest for other and perhaps very different uses — fit symbol of our love to Christ ; but it was a hermetically sealed casket or flask, out of which, if she let one drop fall, the whole must go. It had to be broken ; it had to be devoted to one sole use. It could not be in part reserved or in part diverted to other uses. Where you have such love as this, have you not the highest thing humanity can produce ? Where is it now to be had on earth, where are we to look for this all-devoting, unreserving love, which gathers up all its possessions and pours them out at Christ's feet, saying, "Take all, would it were more " ? The encomium, therefore, was deserved and appro- priate. In her love the Lord would ever live : so long as she existed the remembrance of Him could not die. No death could touch her heart with his chilly hand and freeze the warmth of her devotion. Christ was immortal in her, and she was therefore immortal in Him. Her love was a bond that could not be broken, the truest spiritual union. In embalming Him, there- fore, she unconsciously embalmed herself. Her love was the amber in which He was to be preserved, and she became inviolable as He. Her love was the marble on which His name and worth were engraven, on which His image was deeply sculptured, and they were to live and last together. Christ " prolongs His days " in the loye of His people. In every generation there arise those who will not let His remembrance die out, xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. 13 and who to their own necessities call out the living energy of Christ. In so doing they unwittingly make themselves undying as He ; their love of Him is the little spark of immortality in their soul. It is that which indissolubly and by the only genuine spiritual affinity links them to what is eternal. To all who thus love Him Christ cannot but say, " Because I live, ye shall live also." Another point in our Lord's defence of Mary's conduct, though it is not explicitly asserted, plainly is, that tributes of affection paid directly to Himself are of value to Him. Judas might with some plausibility have quoted against our Lord His own teaching that an act of kindness done to the poor was kindness to Him. It might be said that, on our Lord's own showing, what He desires is, ruDt homage paid to Himself personally, but loving and merciful conduct. And certainly any homage paid to Himself which is not accompanied by such conduct is of no value at all. But as love to Him is the spring and regulator of all right conduct, it is necessary that we should cultivate this love; and because He delights in our well-being and in ourselves, and does not look upon us merely as so much material in which He may exhibit His healing powers. He necessarily rejoices in every expression of true devoted- ness that is paid to Him by any of us. And on our side wherever there is true and ardent love it must crave direct expression. " If ye love me," says our Lord, " keep my commandments " ; and obedience certainly is the normal test and exhibition of love. But there is that in our nature which refuses to be satisfied with obedience, which craves fellowship with what we love, which carries us out of ourselves and compels us to express our feeling directly. And 14 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. that soul is not fully developed whose pent-up gratitude, cherished admiration, and warm aflfection do not from time to time break away from all ordinary modes of expressing devotion and choose some such direct method as Mary chose, or some such straightforward utterance as Peter's : " Lord, Thou knowest all things. Thou knowest that I love Thee." It may, indeed, occur to us, as we read of Mary's tribute to her Lord, that the very words in which He justified her action forbid our supposing that any so grateful tribute can be paid Him by us. " Me ye have not always " may seem to warn us against expecting that so direct and satisfying an intercourse can be maintained now, when we no longer have Him. And no doubt this is one of the standing difficulties of Christian experience. We can love those who live with us, whose eye we can meet, whose voice we know, whose expression of face we can read. We feel it easy to fix 'our affections on one and another of those who are alive contemporaneously with ourselves. But with Christ it is different : we miss those sensible im- pressions made upon us by the living bodily presence ; we find it difficult to retain in the mind a settled idea of the feeling He has towards us. It is an effort to accomplish by faith what sight without any eff'ort effectually accomplishes. We do not see that He loves us ; the looks and tones that chiefly reveal human love are absent ; we are not from hour to hour confronted, whether we will or no, with one evidence or other of love. Were the life of a Christian nowadays no more difficult than it was to Mary, were it brightened with Christ's presence as a household friend, were the whole sum and substance of it merely a giving way to the love He kindled by palpable favours and measurable xii. i-ii.] THE ANOINTING OF JESUS. 15 friendship, then surely the Christian life would be a very simple, very easy, very happy course. But the connection between ourselves and Christ is not of the body that passes, but of the spirit which endures. It is spiritual, and such a connection may be seriously perverted by the interference of sense and of bodily sensations. To measure the love of Christ by His expression of face and by His tone of voice is legitimate, but it is not the truest measurement : to be drawn to Him by the accidental kindnesses our present difficulties must provoke is to be drawn by something short of perfect spiritual affinity. And, on the whole, it is well that our spirit should be allowed to choose its eternal friendship and alliance by what is specially and exclusively its own, so that its choice cannot be mistaken, as the choice sometimes is when there is a mixture of physical and spiritual attractiveness. So much are we guided in youth and in the whole of our life by what is material, so freely do we allow our tastes to be determined and our character to be formed by our connection with what is material, that the whole "man gets blunted in his spiritual perceptions and incapable of appreciating what is not seen. And the great part of our education in this life is to lift the spirit to its true place and to its appropriate company, to teach it to measure its gains apart from material prosperity, and to train it to love with ardour what cannot be seen. Besides, it cannot be doubted that this incident itself very plainly teaches that Christ came into this world to win our love and to turn all duty into a personal acting towards Him ; to make the whole of life like those parts of it which are now its bright exceptional holiday times ; to make all of it a pleasure by making all of it and not i6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. merely parts of it the utterance of love. Even a little love in our life is the sunshine that quickens and warms and brightens the whole. There seems at length to be a reason and a satisfaction in life when love animates us. It is easy to act well to those whom we really love, and Christ has come for the express purpose of bringing our whole life within this charmed circle. He has come not to bring constraint and gloom into our lives, but to let us out into the full liberty and joy of the life that God Himself lives and judges to be the only life worthy of His bestowal upon us. II. THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. VOL. 11. 17 " On the morrow a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took the branches of the palm trees, and went forth to meet Him, and cried out, Hosanna : Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel. And Jesus, having found a young ass, sat thereon ; as it is written, Fear not, daughter of Zion : behold, thy King cometh, sitting on an ass's colt. These things understood not His disciples at the first : but when Jesus was glorified, then remembered they that these things were written of Him, and that they had done these things unto Him. The multitude therefore that was with Him w^hen He called Lazarus out of the tomb, and raised him from the dead, bare witness. For this cause also the multitude went and met Him, for that they heard that He had done this sign. The Pharisees therefore said among them- selves, Behold, how ye prevail nothing : lo, the world is gone after Him." — John xii. 12-iy. tS II. THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. IF our Lord arrived in Bethany on Friday evening and spent the Sabbath with His friends there, " the next day" of ver. 12 is Sunday; and in the Church year this day is known as Palm Sunday, from the incident here related. It was also the day, four days before the Passover, on which the Jews were enjoined by the law to choose their paschal lamb. Some con- sciousness of this may have guided our Lord's action. Certainly He means finally to offer Himself to the people as the Messiah. Often as He had evaded them .before, and often as He had forbidden His disciples to proclaim Him, He is now conscious that His hour has come, and by entering Jerusalem as King of peace He definitely proclaims Himself the promised Messiah. As plainly as the crowning of a new monarch and the flourish of trumpets and the kissing of his hand by the great officers of state proclaim him king, so unmistak- ably does our Lord by riding into Jerusalem on an ass and by accepting the hosannas of the people proclaim Himself the King promised to men through the Jews, as the King of peace who was to win men to His rule by love and sway them by a Divine Spirit. The scene must have been one not easily forgotten. The Mount of Olives runs north and south parallel to THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. the east wall of Jerusalem, and separated from it by a gully, through which flows the brook Kidron. The Mount is crossed by three paths. One of these is a steep footpath, which runs direct over the crest of the hill ; the second runs round its northern shoulder ; while the third crosses the southern slope. It was by this last route the pilgrim caravans were accustomed to enter the city. On the occasion of our Lord's entry the road was probably thronged with visitors making their way to the great annual feast. No fewer than three million persons are said to have been sometimes packed together in Jerusalem at the Passover ; and all of them being on holiday, were ready for any kind of excitement. The idea of a festal procession was quite to their mind. And no sooner did the disciples appear with Jesus riding in their midst than the vast streams of people caught the infection of loyal enthusiasm, tore down bi:anches of the palms and olives which were found in abundance by the roadside, and either waved them in the air or strewed them in the line of march. Others unwrapped their loose cloaks from their shoulders and spread them along the rough path to form a carpet as He approached — a custom which is still, it seems, observed in the East in royal processions, and which has indeed sometimes been imported into our own country on great occasions. Thus with every demonstration of loyalty, with ceaseless shoutings that were heard across the valley in the streets of Jerusalem itself, and waving the palm branches, they moved towards the city. Those who have entered the city from Bethany by this road tell us that there are two striking points in it. The first is when at a turn of the broad and well- defined mountain track the southern portion of the city xii. 12-19.] THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. 21 comes for an instant into view. This part of the city was called " the city of David," and the suggestion is not without probability that it may have been at this point the multitude burst out in words that linked Jesus with David. " Hosanna to the Son of David. Blessed is the King that cometh in the name of the Lord. Blessed is the kingdom of our father David. Hosanna, peace and glory in the highest." This became the watchword of the day, so that even the boys who had come out of the city to see the proces- sion were heard afterwards, as they loitered in the streets, still shouting the same refrain. After this the road again dips, and the glimpse of the city is lost behind the intervening ridge of Olivet ; but shortly a rugged ascent is climbed and a ledge of bare rock is reached, - and in an instant the whole city bursts into view. The prospect from this point must have been one of the grandest of its kind in the world, the fine natural position of Jerusalem not only showing to advantage, but the long line of city wall embracing, like the setting of a jewel, the marvellous structures of Herod, the poHshed marble and the gilded pinnacles glittering in the morning sun and dazzling the eye. It was in all probability at this point that our Lord was overcome with regret when He considered the sad fate of the beautiful city, and when in place of the smiling palaces and apparently impregnable walls His imagina- tion filled His eye with smoke-blackened ruins, with pavements slippery with blood, with walls breached at all points and choked with rotting corpses. Our Lord's choice of the ass was significant. The ass was commonly used for riding, and the well-cared-for ass of the rich man was a very fine animal, much larger and stronger than the little breed with which we are THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. familiar. Its coat, too, is as glossy as a well-kept horse's — " shiny black, or satiny white, or sleek mouse colour." It was not chosen by our Lord at this time that He might show His humility, for it would have been still humbler to walk like His disciples. So far from being a token of humility. He chose a colt which apparently had never borne another rider. He rather meant by claiming the ass and by riding into Jerusalem upon it to assert His royalty ; but He did not choose a horse, because that animal would have suggested royalty of quite another kind from His — royalty which was main- tained by war and outward force ; for the horse and the chariot had always been among the Hebrews symbolic of warlike force. The disciples themselves, strangely enough, did not see the significance of this action, although, when they had time to reflect upon it, they remembered that Zechariah had said : " Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion ; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem : behold, fhy King cometh unto thee : He is just, and having salvation ; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. And I will cut off the chariot from Ephraim, and the horse from Jerusalem, and the battle bow shall be cut off: and He shall speak peace unto the heathen.*' When John says, " these things understood not His disciples at the first," he cannot mean that they did not understand that Jesus by this act claimed to be the Messiah, because even the mob perceived the signifi- cance of this entry into Jerusalem and hailed Him " Son of David." What they did not understand, probably, was why He chose this mode of identifying Himself with the Messiah. At any rate, their per- plexity brings out very clearly that the conception was not suggested to Jesus. He was not induced by the xii. 12-19] THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. 23 disciples nor led on by the people to make a demon- stration which He Himself scarcely approved or had not intended to make. On the contrary, from His first recorded act that morning He had taken command of the situation. Whatever was done was done with deliberation, at His own instance and as His own act.^ This then in the first place ; it was His own deli- berate act. He put Himself forward, knowing that He would receive the hosannas of the people, and intend- ing that He should receive them. All His backwardness is gone ; all shyness of becoming a public spectacle is gone. For this also is to be noted — that no place or occasion could have been more public than the Pass- over at Jerusalem. Whatever it was He meant to indicate by His action, it was to the largest possible public He meant to indicate it. No longer in the retire- ment of a Galilean village, nor in a fisherman's cottage, nor in dubious or ambiguous terms, but in the full blaze of the utmost publicity that could possibly be given to His proclamation, and in language that could not be forgotten or misinterpreted. He now declared Himself. He knew He must attract the attention of the authorities, and His entrance was a direct challenge to them. What was it then that with such deliberation and such publicity He meant to proclaim ? What was it that in these last critical hours of His life, when He knew He should have few more opportunities of speak- ing to the people. He sought to impress upon them ? What was it that, when free from the solicitations of ' This is more distinctly brought out in the Synoptic Gospels than in St. John : cp. Mark xi. i-io. 24 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. men and the pressure of circumstances, He sought to declare? It was that He was the Messiah. There might be those in the crowd who did not understand what was meant. There might be persons who did not know Him, or who were incompetent judges of cha- racter, and supposed He was a mere enthusiast carried away by dweUing too much on some one aspect of Old Testament prophecy. In every generation there are good men who become almost crazed upon some one topic, and sacrifice everything to the promotion of one favourite hope. But however He might be misjudged, there can be no question of His own idea of the signi- ficance of His action. He claims to be the Messiah. Such a claim is the most stupendous that could be made. To be the Messiah is to be God's Viceroy and Representative on earth, able to represent God ade- quately to men, and to bring about that perfect con- dition which is named "the kingdom of God." The Messiah must be conscious of ability perfectly to accom- plish the will of God with man, and to bring men into absolute harmony with God. This is claimed by Jesus. He stands in His sober senses and claims to be that universal Sovereign, that true King of men, whom the Jews had been encouraged to expect^ and who when He came would reign over Gentiles as well as Jews. By this demonstration, to which His previous career had been naturally leading up, He claims to take com- mand of earth, of this world in all its generations, not in the easier sense of laying down upon paper a political constitution fit for all races, but in the sense of being able to deliver mankind from the source of all their misery and to lift men to a true superiority. He has gone about on earth, not secluding Himself from the woes and ways of men, not delicately isolating Himself, xii. 12-19.] THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. 25 but exposing Himself freely to the touch of the malig- nities, the vulgarities, the ignorance and wickedness of all ; and He now claims to rule all this, and implies that earth can present no complication of distress or iniquity which he cannot by the Divine forces within Him transform into health and purity and hope. This then is His deliberate claim. He quietly but distinctly proclaims that He fulfils all God's promise and purpose among men ; is that promised King who was to rectify all things, to unite men to Himself, and to lead them on to their true destiny ; to be practically God upon earth, accessible to men and identified with all human interests. Many have tested His claim and have proved its validity. By true allegiance to Him many have found that they have gained the mastery over the world. - They have entered into peace, have felt eternal verities underneath their feet, and have attained a connection with God such as must be ever- lasting. They are filled with a new spirit towards men and see all things with purged eyes. Not abruptly and unintelligibly, by leaps and bounds, but gradually and in harmony with the nature of things. His kingdom is extending. Already His Spirit has done much : in time His Spirit will everywhere prevail. It is by Him and on the lines which He has laid down that humanity is advancing to its goal. This was the claim He made; and this claim was enthusiastically admitted by the popular instinct.^ The populace was not merely humouring in holiday mood a whimsical person for their own diversion. Many of them knew Lazarus and knew Jesus, and taking the ' According to the reading of the scene by St. John, the people needed no prompting. 26 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. matter seriously gave the tone to the rest. The people indeed did not, any more than the disciples, understand how different the kingdom of their expectation was from the kingdom Jesus meant to found. But while they entirely misapprehended the purpose for which He was sent, they believed that He was sent by God : His credentials were absolutely satisfactory, His work incomprehensible. But as yet they still thought He must be of the same mind as themselves regarding the work of the Messiah. To His claim, therefore, the response given by the people was loud and demonstra- tive. It was indeed a very brief reign they accorded to their King, but their prompt acknowledgment of Him was the instinctive and irrepressible expression of what they really felt to be His due. A popular demonstration is notoriously untrustworthy, always running to extremes, necessarily uttering itself with a loudness far in excess of individual conviction, and gathering fo itself the loose and floating mass of people who have no convictions of their own, and are thankful to any one who leads them and gives them a cue, and helps them to feel that they have after all a place in the community. Who has not stood by as an onlooker at a public demonstration and smiled at the noise and glare that a mass of people will produce when their feelings are ever so little stirred, and marked how even against their own individual sentiments they are carried away by the mere tide of the day's circumstances, and for the mere sake of making a demonstration ? This crowd which followed our Lord with shoutings very speedily repented and changed their shouts into a far blinder shriek of rage against Him who had been the occasion of their folly. And it must indeed have been a humbling experience for our Lord to have Him- xii. 12-19.] THE ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM. 27 self ushered into Jerusalem by a crowd through whose hosannas He already heard the mutter of their curses. Such is the homage He has to content Himself with — such is the homage a perfect life has won. For He knew what was in man ; and while His disciples might be deceived by this popular response to His claim, He Himself was fully aware how little it could be built upon. Save in His own heart, there is no premonition of death. More than ever in His life before does His sky seem bright without a cloud. He Himself is in His early prime with life before Him ; His followers are hopeful, the multitude jubilant ; but through all this gay enthusiasm He sees the scowling hate of the priests and scribes ; the shouting of the multitude does not drown in His ear the mutterings of a Judas and of the Sanhedrim. He knew that the throne He was now hailed to was the cross, that His coronation was the reception on His own brows of all the thorns and stings and burdens that man's sin had brought into the world. He did not fancy that the redemption of the world to God was an easy matter which could be accomplished by an afternoon's enthu- siasm. He kept steadily before His mind the actual condition of the men who were by His spiritual influence to become the willing and devoted subjects of God's kingdom. He measured with accuracy the forces against Him, and understood that His warfare was not with the legions of Rome, against whom this Jewish patriotism and indomitable courage and easily roused enthusiasm might tell, but with principalities and powers a thousand- fold stronger, with the demons of hatred and jealousy, of lust and worldliness, of carnality and selfishness. Never for a moment did He forget His true mission and sell His spiritual throne, hard-earned as it was to 28 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. be, for popular applause and the glories of the hour. Knowing that only by the utmost of human goodness and self-sacrifice, and by the utmost of trial and en- durance, could any true and lasting rule of men be gained, He chose this path and the throne it led to. With the most comprehensive view of the kingdom He was to found, and with a spirit of profound seriousness strangely contrasting in its composed and self-possessed insight with the blind tumult around Him, He claimed the crown of the Messiah. His suffering was not formal and nominal, it was not a mere pageant ; equally real was the claim He now made and which brought Him to that suffering. III. THE CORN OF WHEAT^ 29 "Now there were certain Greeks among those that went up to worship at the feast : these therefore came to Philip, which was of Bethsaida of Galilee, and asked him, saying, Sir, we would see Jesus. Philip Cometh and telleth Andrew : Andrew cometh, and Philip, and they tell Jesus. And Jesus answereth them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone ; but if it die, it beareth much fruit. He that loveth his life loseth it ; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal," — ^John xii. 20-26. 30 -' ; III. THE CORN OF WHEAT. ST. JOHN now introduces a third incident to show that all is ripe for the death of Jesus. Already he has shown us that in the inmost circle of His friends He has now won for Himself a permanent place, a love which ensures that His memory will be had in ever- lasting remembrance. Next, he has lifted into promi- nence the scene in which the outer circle of the Jewish people were constrained, in an hour when their honest .enthusiasm and instincts carried them away, to acknow- ledge Him as the Messiah who had come to fulfil all God's will upon earth. He now goes on to tell us how this agitation at the centre was found rippling in ever-widening circles till it broke with a gentle whisper on the shores of the isles of the Gentiles. This is the significance which St. John sees in the request of the Greeks that they might be introduced to Jesus. These Greeks were " of those that came up to worship at the feast." They were proselytes, Greeks by birth, Jews by religion. They suggest the import- ance for Christianity of the leavening process which Judaism was accomplishing throughout the world. They may not have come from any remoter country than Galilee, but from traditions and customs separate as the poles from the Jewish customs and thoughts. 32 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. From their heathen surroundings they came to Jeru- salem, possibly for the first time, with wondering anticipations of the blessedness of those who dwelt in God's house, and feeling their thirst for the living God burning within them as their eyes lighted on the pin- nacles of the Temple, and as at last their feet stood within its precincts. But up through all these desires grew one that overshadowed them, and, through all the petitions which a year or many years of sin and diffi- culty had made familiar to their lips, this petition made its way : "Sir, we would see Jesus." This petition they address to Philip, not only because he had a Greek name, and therefore presumably be- longed to a family in which Greek was spoken and Greek connections cultivated, but because, as St. Jchn reminds us, he was " of Bethsaida of Galilee," and might be expected to understand and speak Greek, if, indeed, he was not already known to these strangers in Jeru- salem. And by their request they obviously did not mean that Philip should set them in a place of vantage from which they might have a good view of Jesus as He passed by, for this they could well have accom- plished without Philip's friendly intervention. But they wished to question and make Him out, to see for them- selves whether there were in Jesus what even in Judaism they felt to be lacking — whether He at last might not satisfy the longings of their Divinely awakened spirits. Possibly they may even have wished to ascertain His purposes regarding the outlying nations, how the Messianic reign was to affect them. Possibly they may even have thought of offering Him an asylum where He might find shelter from the hostility of His own people. Evidently Philip considered that this request was xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 33 critical. The Apostles had been charged not to enter into any Gentile city, and they might naturally suppose that Jesus would be reluctant to be interviewed by Greeks. But before dismissing the request, he lays it before Andrew his friend, who also bore a Greek name; and after deliberation the two make bold, if not to urge the request, at least to inform Jesus that it had been made. At once in this modestly urged petition He hears the whole Gentile world uttering its weary, long- disappointed sigh, " We would see." This is no mere Greek inquisitiveness ; it is the craving of thoughtful men recognising their need of a Redeemer. To the eye of Jesus, therefore, this meeting opens a prospect which for the moment overcomes Him with the bright- ness of its glory. In this little knot of strangers He sees the firstfruits of the immeasurable harvest which was henceforth to be continuously reaped among the Gentiles. No more do we hear the heart-broken cry, ." O Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! " no longer the reproachful "Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life," but the glad consummation of His utmost hope utters itself in the words, " The hour is come that the Son of man should be glorified." But while promise was thus given of the glorification of the Messiah by His reception among all men, the path which led to this was never absent from the mind of our Lord. Second to the inspiriting thought of His recognition by the Gentile world came the thought of the painful means by which alone He could be truly glorified. He checks, therefore, the shout of exultation which He sees rising to the lips of His disciples with the sobering reflection : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone : but if it die, it bringeth forth much VOL. II. :; 34 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. fruit." As if He said, Do not fancy that I have nothing to do but to accept the sceptre which these men offer, to seat Myself on the world's throne. The world's throne is the Cross. These men will not know My power until I die. The manifestation of Divine pre- sence in My life, has been distinct enough to win them to inquiry ; they will be for ever won to Me by the Divine presence revealed in My death. Like the corn of wheat, I must die if I would be abundantly fruitful. It is through death My whole living power can be disengaged and can accomplish all possibilities. Two points are here suggested : (I.) That the life, the living force that was in Christ, reached its proper value and influence through His death ; and (II.) that the proper value of Christ's life is that it propagates similar lives. I. The life of Christ acquired its proper value and received' its fit development through His death. This truth He sets before us in the illuminating figure of the corn of wheat. " Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone." There are three uses to which wheat may be put : it may be stored for sale, it may be ground and eaten, it may be sown. For our Lord's purposes these three uses may be con- sidered as only two. Wheat may be eaten, or it may be sown. With a pickle of wheat or a grain of oats you may do one of two things : you may eat it and enjoy a momentary gratification and benefit ; or you may put it in the ground, burying it out of sight and suffering it to pass through uncomely processes, and it will reappear multiplied a hundredfold, and so on in everlasting series. Year by year men sacrifice their choicest sample of grain, and are content to bury it in the earth instead of exposing it in the market, because xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 35 they understand that except it die it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit. The proper life of the grain is terminated when it is used for imme- diate gratification : it receives its fullest development and accomplishes its richest end when it is cast into the ground, buried out of sight, and apparently lost. As with the grain, so is it with each human life. One of two things you can do with your life ; both you cannot do, and no third thing is possible. You may consume your life for your own present gratifica- tion and profit, to satisfy your present cravings and tastes and to secure the largest amount of immediate enjoyment to yourself — you may eat your life ; or you may be content to put aside present enjoyment and profits of a selfish kind and devote your life to the uses of God and men. In the one case you make an end of your life, you consume it as it goes; no good results, no enlarging influence, no deepening of character, no •fuller life, follows from such an expenditure of life — - spent on yourself and on the present, it terminates with yourself and with the present. But in the other case you find you have entered into a more abundant life ; by living for others your interests are widened, your desire for life increased, the results and ends of life enriched. " He that loveth his life shall lose it ; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." It is a law we cannot evade. He that consumes his life now, spending it on himself — he who cannot bear to let his life out of his own hand, but cherishes and pampers it and gathers all good around it, and will have the fullest present enjoyment out of it, — this man is losing his life ; it comes to an end as certainly as the seed that is eaten. But he who devotes his life to other uses than his own gratification, who 36 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. does not so prize self that everything must minister to its comfort and advancement, but who can truly yield himself to God and put himself at God's disposal for the general good, — this man, though he may often seem to lose his life, and often does lose it so far as present advantage goes, keeps it to life everlasting. The law of the seed is the law of human life. Use your life for present and selfish gratification and to satisfy your present cravings, and you lose it for ever. Renounce self, yield yourself to God, spend your life for the common good, irrespective of recognition or the lack of it, personal pleasure or the absence of it, and although your life may thus seem to be lost, it is finding its best and highest development and passes into life eternal. Your life is a seed now, not a developed plant, and it can become a developed plant only by your taking heart to cast it frorh you and sow it in the fertile soil of other men's needs. This will seem, indeed, to disintegrate it and fritter it away, and leave it a contemptible, obscure, forgotten thing; but it does, in fact, set free the vital forces that are in it, and give it its fit career and maturity. Looking at the thing itself, apart from figure, it is apparent that " he that loveth his life shall lose it ; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." The man who most freely -uses his life for others, keeping least to himself and living solely for the common interests of mankind, has the most enduring influence. He sets in motion forces which propagate fresh results eternally. And not only so. He who freely sows his life has it eternally, not only in so far as he has set in motion an endless series of beneficent influences, but inasmuch as he himself enters into life eternal. An immortality of influence is one thing and xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 37 a very great thing ; but an immortality of personal life is another, and this also is promised by our Lord when He says (ver. 26), " Where I am, there shall also My servant be." This, then, being the law of human life, Christ, being man, must not only enounce but observe it. He speaks of Himself even more directly than of us when He says, " He that loveth his life shall lose it." His disciples thought they had never seen such promise in His life as at this hour : seedtime seemed to them to be past, and the harvest at hand. Their Master seemed to be fairly launched on the tide that was to carry Him to the highest pinnacle of human glory. And so He was, but not, as they thought, by simply yielding Himself to be set as King and to receive adoration from Jew and Gentile. He saw with different eyes, and that it was a different exaltation which would win for Him lasting sovereignty : " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." He knew the law which governed the develop- ment of human life. He knew that a total and absolute surrender of self to the uses and needs of others was the one path to permanent life, and that in His case this absolute surrender involved death. A comparison of the good done by the life of Christ with that done by His death shows how truly He judged when He declared that it was by His death He should effectually gather all men to Him. His death, like the dissolution of the seed, seemed to terminats His work, but really was its germination. So long ae He lived, it was but His single strength that was used ; He abode alone. There was great virtue in His life — great power for the healing, the instruction, the eleva- tion, of mankind. In His brief public career He sug- gested much to the influential men of His time, set all 38 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. men who knew Him a-thinking, aided many to reform their lives, and removed a large amount of distress and disease. He communicated to the world a mass of new truth, so that those who have lived after Him have stood at quite a different level of knowledge from that of those who lived before Him. And yet how little of the proper results of Christ's influence, how little under- standing of Christianity, do you find even in His nearest friends until He died. By the visible appearance and the external benefits and the false expectations His greatness created, the minds of men were detained from penetrating to the spirit and mind of Christ. It was expedient for them that He should go away, for until He went they depended on His visible power, and His spirit could not be wholly received by them. They were looking at the husk of the seed, and its life could not reach them. They were looking for help from Him instead of themselves becoming like Him. And therefore He chose at an early age to cease from all that was marvellous and beneficent in His fife among men. He might, as these Greeks suggested, have visited other lands and have continued His healing and teaching there. He might have done more in His own time than He did, and His time might have been indefi- nitely prolonged ; but He chose to cease from all this and voluntarily gave Himself to die, judging that thereby He could do much more good than by His life. He was straitened till this was accomplished ; He felt as a man imprisoned and whose powers are held in check. It was winter and not spring-time with Him. There was a change to pass upon Him which should disengage the vital forces that were in Him and cause their full power to be felt — a change which should thaw the springs of life in Him and let them flow forth to all. xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 39 To use His own figure, He was as a seed unsown so long as He lived, valuable only in His own proper person; but by dying His life obtained the value of seed sown, propagating its kind in everlasting increase. II. The second point suggested is, that the proper value of Christ's life consists in this — that it propagates similar lives. As seed produces grain of its own kind, so Christ produces men like Christ. He ceasing to do good in this world as a living man, a multitude of others by this very cessation are raised in His likeness. By His death we receive both inclination and ability to become with Him sons of God. "The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge that if one died for all, then all died ; and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto them- selves, but unto Him that died for them." By His death He has effected an entrance for this law of self- surrender into human life, has exhibited it in a perfect form, and has won others to live as He lived. So that, using the figure He used, we may say that the company of Christians now on earth are Christ in a new form, His body indeed. "That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain : but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him, and to every seed his own body." Christ having been sown, lives now in His people. They are the body in which He dwells. And this will be seen. For standing and looking at a head of barley waving on its stalk, no amount of telling would persuade you that that had sprung from a seed of wheat ; and looking at any life which is characterised by "selfish ambition and eagerness for advancement and little regard for the wants of other men, no persuasion can make it credible 40 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. that that life springs from the self-sacrificing life of Christ. What Christ here shows us, then, is that the prin- ciple which regulates the development of seed regulates the growth, continuance, and fruitfulness of human life ; that whatever is of the nature of seed gets to its full life only through death; that our Lord, knowing this law, submitted to it, or rather by His native love was attracted to the life and death which revealed this law to Him. He gave His life away for the good of men, and therefore prolongs His days and sees His seed eternally. There is not one way for Him and another for us. The same law applies to all. It is not peculiar to Christ. The work He did was peculiar to Him, as each individual has his own place and work ; but the principle on which all right lives are led is one and the same universally. What Christ did He did because He was living a human life on right principles.- We need not die on the cross as He did, but we must as truly yield ourselves as living sacrifices to the interests of men. If we have not done so, we have yet to go back to the very beginning of all lasting life and progress ; and we are but deceiving ourselves by attainments and successes which are not only hollow, but are slowly cramping and killing all that is in us. Whoever will choose the same destiny as Christ must take the same road to it that He took. He took the one right way for men to go, and said, " If any man follow Me, where I am there will he be also." If we do not follow Him, we really walk in darkness and know not whither we go. We cannot five for selfish purposes and then enjoy the common happiness and glory of the race. Self-seeking is self-destroying. And it is needful to remark that this self-renunciation xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 4' must be real. The law of sacrifice is the law not for a year or two in order to gain some higher selfish good — which is not self-sacrifice, but deeper self-seeking ; it is the law of all human life, not a short test of our fidelity to Christ, but the only law on which life can ever proceed. It is not a barter of self I make, giving it up for a little that I may have an enriched self to eternity ; but it is a real foregoing and abandon- ment of self for ever, a change of desire and nature, so that instead of finding my joy in what concerns myself only I find my joy in what is serviceable to others. Thus only can we enter into permanent happiness. Goodness and happiness are one — one in the long-run, if not one in every step of the way. We are not asked to live for others without any heart to do so. We are not asked to choose as our eternal life what will be a constant pain and can only be reluctantly done. The very heathen would not offer in sacrifice the animal "that struggled as it was led to the altar. All sacrifice must be willingly made ; it must be the sacrifice which is prompted by love. God and this world demand our best work, and only what we do with pleasure can be our best work. Sacrifice of self and labour for others are not like Christ's sacrifice and labour unless they spring from love. Forced, reluctant, constrained sacri- fice or service — service which is no joy to ourselves through the love we bear to those for whom we do it — is not the service that is required of us. Service into which we can throw our whole strength, because we are convinced it will be of use to others, and because we long to see them enjoying it — this is the service required. Love, in short, is the solution of all. Find your happiness in the happiness of many rather than 4^ THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. in the happiness of one, and life becomes simple and inspiring. Nor are we to suppose that this is an impracticable, high-pitched counsel of perfection with which plain men need not trouble themselves. Every human life is under this law. There is no path to goodness or to happiness save this one. Nature herself teaches us as much. When a man is truly attracted by another, and when genuine affection possesses his heart, his whole being is enlarged, and he finds it his best pleasure to serve that person. The father who sees his children enjoying the fruit of his toil feels himself a far richer man than if he were spending all on himself. But this family affection, this domestic solution of the problem of happy self-sacrifice, is intended to encourage and show us the way to a wider extension of our love, and thereby of our use and happiness. The more love we have, the happier we are. Self-sacrifice looks miserable; and we shrink from it as from death and destitution, because we look at it in separation from the love it springs from. Self-sacrifice without love is death ; we abandon our own life and do not find it again in any other. It is a seed ground under the heel, not a seed lightly thrown into prepared soil. It is in love that goodness and happiness have their common root. And it is this love which is required of us and promised to us. So that as often as we shudder at the dissolution of our own personal interests, the scattering of our own selfish hopes and plans, the surrender of our life to the service of others, we are to remember that this, which looks so very like death, and which often throws around our prospects the chilling atmosphere of the tomb, is not really the termination, but the beginning of the true and eternal xii. 20-26.] THE CORN OF WHEAT. 43 life of the spirit. Let us keep our heart in the fellow- ship of the sacrifice of Christ, let us feel our way into the meanings and uses of that sacrifice, and learn its reality, its utility, its grace, and at length it will lay hold of our whole nature, and we shall find that it impels us to regard other men with interest and to find our true joy and life in serving them. IV. THE ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 45 " Now is my soul troubled ; and what shall I say? Father, save Me from this hour. But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy name. There came therefore a voice out of heaven, saying, I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again. The multitude there- fore, that stood by, and heard it, said that it had thundered : others said, An angel hath spoken to Him. Jesus answered and said. This voice hath not come for My sake, but for your sakes. Now is the judgment of this world : now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself But this He said, signifying by what manner of death He should die. The multitude therefore answered Him, We have heard out of the law that the Christ abideth for ever : and how sayest thou. The Son of man must be lifted up ? who is this Son of man ? Jesus therefore said unto them. Yet a little while is the light among you. Walk while ye have the light, that darkness overtake you not : and he that walketh in the darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have the light, believe on the light, that ye may become sons of light." — ^JOHN xii. 27-36. IV. THE ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. THE presence of the Greeks had stirred in the soul of Jesus conflicting emotions. Glory by humi- liation, life through death, the secured happiness of mankind through His own anguish and abandonment, — well might the prospect disturb Him. So masterly is His self-command, so steadfast and constant His habitual temper, that one almost inevitably underrates the severity of the conflict. The occasional withdrawal of the veil permits us reverently to observe some •symptoms of the turmoil within — symptoms which it is probably best to speak of in His own words : " Now is My soul troubled ; and what shall I say ? Shall I say, ' Father, save Me from this hour ' ? But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy name." This Evangelist does not describe the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was needless after this indication of the same conflict. Here is the same shrinking from a public and shameful death conquered by His resolution to deliver men from a still darker and more shameful death. Here is the same foretaste of the bitterness of the cup as it now actually touches His lips, the same clear reckoning of all it meant to drain that cup to the dregs, together with the deliberate assent to all that the will of the Father might require Him to endurCi 47 48 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. In response to this act of submission, expressed in the words, " Father, glorify Thy name," there came a voice from heaven, saying, " I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again." The meaning of this assurance was, that as in all the past manifestation of Christ the Father had become better known to men, so in all that was now impending, however painful and disturbed, however filled with human passions and to all appearance the mere result of them, the Father would still be glorified. Some thought the voice was thunder ; others seemed almost to catch articulate sounds, and said, " An angel spake to Him." But Jesus explained that it was not " to Him " the voice was specially addressed, but rather for the sake of those who stood by. And it was indeed of immense importance that the disciples should understand that the events which were about to happen were overruled by God that He might be glorified in Christ. It is easy for us to see that nothing so glorifies the Father's name as these [~ hours of suffering ; but how hard for the onlookers to I believe that this sudden transformation of the Messianic [throne into the criminal's cross was no defeat of God's purpose, but its final fulfilment. He leads them, there- fore, to consider that in His judgment the whole world is judged, and to perceive in His arrest and trial and condemnation not merely the misguided and wanton outrage of a few men in power, but the critical hour of the world's history. This world has commonly presented itself to thought- ful minds as a battle-field in which the powers of good and evil wage ceaseless war. In the words He now utters the Lord declares Himself to be standing at the very crisis of the battle, and with the deepest assurance He announces that the opposing power is broken and xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 49 that victory remains with Him. " Now is the prince of this world cast out ; and I will draw all men unto Me." The prince of this world, that which actually rules and leads men in opposition to God, was judged, condemned, and overthrown in the death of Christ. By His meek acceptance of God's will in the face of all that could make it difficult and dreadful to accept it. He won for the race deliverance from the thraldom of sin. At length a human life had been lived without submission at any point to the prince of this world. As man and in the name of all men Jesus resisted the last and most violent assault that could be made upon His faith in God and fellowship with Him, and so perfected His obedience and overcame the prince of this world, — overcame him not in one act alone — • many had done that — but in a completed human life, in a life which had been freely exposed to the complete array of temptations that can be directed against men in this world. In order more clearly to apprehend the promise of victory contained in our Lord's words, we may consider (I.) the object He had in view — to " draw all men " to Him ; and (H.) the condition of His attaining this object — namely. His death. I. The object of Christ was to draw all men to Him. The opposition in which He here sets Himself to the prince of this world shows us that by " drawing " He means attracting as a king attracts, to His name. His claims, His standard. His person. Our life consists in our pursuance of one object or another, and our devotion is continually competed for. When two claimants contest a kingdom, the country is divided between them, part cleaving to the one and part to the other. The individual determines to which side he VOL. II. 4 50 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. shall cleave, — by his prejudices or by his justice, as it may be ; by his knowledge of the comparative capacity of the claimants, or by his ignorant predilection. He is taken in by sounding titles, or he penetrates through all bombast and promises and douceurs to the real merit or demerit of the man himself. One person will judge by the personal manners of the respective claim- ants ; another by their published manifesto, and pro- fessed object and style of rule ; another by their known character and probable conduct. And while men thus range themselves on this side or on that, they really pass judgment on themselves, betraying as they do what it is that chiefly draws them, and taking their places on the side of good or evil. It is thus that we all judge ourselves by following this or that claimant to our faith, regard, and devotion, to ourself and our life. What we spend ourselves on, what we aim at and pursue, what we make our object, that judges us and that rules us and that determines our destiny. Christ came into the world to be our King, to lead us to worthy achievements. He came that we might have a worthy object of choice and of the devotion of our life. He serves the same purpose as a king : He embodies in His own person, and thereby makes visible and attractive, the will of God and the cause of righteous- ness. Persons who could only with great difficulty apprehend His objects and plans can appreciate His person and trust Him. Persons to whom there would seem little attraction in a cause or in an undefined " progress of humanity " can kindle with enthusiasm towards Him personally, and unconsciously promote His cause and the cause of humanity. And therefore, while some are attracted by His person, others by the legitimacy of His claims, others by His programme xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 51 of government, others by His benefactions, we must beware of denying loyalty to any of these. Expressions of love to His person may be lacking in the man who yet most intelligently enters into Christ's views for the race, and sacrifices his means and his life to forward these views. Those who gather to His standard are various in temperament, are drawn by various attrac- tions, and must be various in their forms of showing allegiance. And this, which is the strength of His camp, can only become its weakness when men begin to think there is no way but their own ; and that alle- giance which is strenuous in labour but not fluent in devout expression, or loyalty which shouts and throws its cap in the air but lacks intelligence, is displeasing to the King. The King, who has great ends in view, will not inquire what it is precisely which forms the bond between Him and His subjects so long as they truly sympathise with Him and second His efforts. The one question is. Is He their actual leader ? Of the kingdom of Christ, though a full description cannot be given, one or two of the essential charac- teristics may be mentioned. I. It is a kingdom, a community of men under one head. When Christ proposed to attract men to Him- self, it was for the good of the race He did so. It could achieve its destiny only if He led it, only if it yielded itself to His mind and ways. And those who are attracted to Him, and see reason to believe that the hope of the world lies in the universal adoption of His mind and ways, are formed into one solid body or com- munity. They labour for the same ends, are governed by the same laws, and whether they know one another or not they have the most real sympathy and live for one cause. Being drawn to Christ, we enter into 52 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. abiding fellowship with all the good who have laboured or are labouring in the cause of humanity. We take our places in the everlasting kingdom, in the community of those who shall see and take part in the great future of mankind and the growing enlargement of its destiny. We are hereby entered among the living, and are joined to that body of mankind which is to go on and which holds the future — not to an extinct party which may have memories, but has no hopes. In sin, in selfishness, in worldliness, individualism reigns, and all profound or abiding unity is impossible. Sinners have common interests only for a time, only as a temporary guise of selfish interests. Every man out rof Christ is really an isolated individual. But passing into Christ's kingdom we are no longer isolated, aban- doned wretches stranded by the stream of time, but members of the undying commonwealth of men in which our life, our work, our rights, our future, our > association with all good, are assured. "" 2. It is a universal kingdom. " I will draw all men unto Me." The one rational hope of forming men into one kingdom shines through these words. The idea of a universal monarchy has visited the great minds of our race. They have cherished their various dreams of a time when all men should live under one law and possibly speak one language, and have interests so truly in common that war should be impossible. But an effectual instrument for accomplishing this grand design has ever been wanting. Christ turns this grandest dream of humanity into a rational hope. He appeals to what is universally present in human nature. There is that in Him which every man needs, — a door to the Father ; t. visible image of the unseen God ; a gracious, wise, and holy Friend. He does not appeal \ xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 53 exclusively to one generation, to educated or to un- educated, to Orientals or to Europeans alone, but to man, to that which we have in common with the lowest and the highest, the most primitive and most highly developed of the species. The attractive influence He exerts upon men is not conditioned by their historical insight, by their ability to sift evidence, by this or that which distinguishes man from man, but by their innate consciousness that some higher power than themselves exists, by their ability, if not to recognise goodness when they see it, at least to recognise love when it is spent upon them. But while our Lord affirms that there is that in Him which all men can recognise and learn to love and serve, He does not say that His kingdom will therefore be quickly formed. He does not say that this greatest work of God will take a shorter time than the common works of God which prolong one day of our hasty ■ methods into a thousand years of solidly growing pur- pose. If it has taken a million ages for the rocks to knit and form for us a standing-ground and dwelling- place, we must not expect that this kingdom, which is to be the one enduring result of this world's history, and which can be built up only of thoroughly convinced men and of generations slowly weeded of traditional prejudices and customs, can be completed in a few years. No doubt interests are at stake in human destiny and losses are made by human waste which had no place in the physical creation of the world ; still, God's methods are, as we judge,, slow, and we must not think that He who " works hitherto " is doing nothing because the swift processes of jugglery or the hasty methods of human workmanship find no place in the extension of Christ's kingdom. This kingdom 54 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. has a firm hold of the world and must grow. If there is one thing certain about the future of the world, it is that righteousness and truth will prevail. The world is bound to come to the feet of Christ. 3. Christ's kingdom being universal, it is also and necessarily imvard. What is common to all men lies deepest in each. Christ was conscious that He held the key to human nature. He knew what was in man. With the penetrating insight of absolute purity He had gone about among men, freely mixing with rich and with poor, with the sick and the healthy, with the religious and the irreligious. He was as much at home with the condemned criminal as with the blameless Pharisee ; saw through Pilate and Caiaphas alike ; knew all that the keenest dramatist could tell Him of the meannesses, the depravities, the cruelties, the blind passions, the obstructed goodness, of men ; but knew also that. He could sway all that was in man and exhibit that to men which should cause the sinner to abhor his sin and seek the face of God. This He would do by a simple moral process, without violent demonstration or disturbance or assertion of authority. He would "draw" men. It is by uiward conviction, not by outward compulsion, men are to become His subjects. It is by the free and rational working of the human mind that Jesus builds up His kingdom. His hope lies in a fuller and fuller light, in a clearer and clearer recognition of facts. Attachment to Christ must be the act of the soul's self ; everything, therefore, which strengthens the will or enlightens the mind or enlarges the man brings him nearer to the kingdom of Christ, and makes it more likely he will yield to His drawing. And because Christ's rule is inward it is therefore of xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 55 universal application. The inmost choice of the man being governed by Christ, and his character being thus touched at its inmost spring, all his conduct will be governed by Christ and be a carrying out of the will of Christ. It is not the frame of society Christ seeks to alter, but the spirit of it. It is not the occupations and institutions of human life which the subject of Christ finds to be incompatible with Christ's rule, so much as the aim and principles on which they are conducted. The kingdom of Christ claims all human life as its own, and the spirit of Christ finds nothing that is essentially human alien from it. If the statesman is a Christian, it will be seen in his policy ; if the poet is a Christian, his song will betray it ; if a thinker be a Christian, his readers soon find it out. Christianity does not mean religious services', churches, creeds, Bibles, books, equipment of any kind ; it means the Spirit of Christ. It is the most portable and flexible of all religions, and therefore the most pervasive and dominant in the life of its adherent. It needs but the Spirit of God and the spirit of man, and Christ mediating between them. II. Such being Christ's object, what is the condition of His attaining it ? " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." \The elevation requisite for becoming a visible object to men of all generations was the eleva- tion of the Cross.J His death would accomplish what His life could not accomplish. The words betray a distinct consciousness that there was in His death a more potent spell, a more certain and real influence for good among men than in His teaching or in His miracles or in His purity of hfe. What is it, then, in the death of Christ which so far surpasses His life in its power of attraction ? The life 56 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. was equally unselfish and devoted ; it was more pro- longed ; it was more directly useful, — why, then, would it have been comparatively ineffective without the death ? 'It may, in the first place, be answered, Because His death presents in a dramatic and compact form that \very devotedness which is diffused through every part of His life. Between the life and the death there is the same difference as between sheet lightning and forked lightning, between the diffused heat of the sun and the same heat focussed upon a point through a lens. It discloses what was actually but latently there. The life and the death of Christ are one and mutually explain each other. From the hfe we learn that no motive can have prompted Christ to die but the one motive which ruled Him always — the desire to do all God willed in men's behalf. We cannot interpret the death as anything else than a consistent part of a deliberate work undertaken for men's good. It was not an accident ; it was not an external necessity : it ' was, as the whole life was, a willing acceptance of the uttermost that was required to set men on a higher level and unite them to God. But as the life throws this light upon the death of Christ, how that light is gathered up and thrown abroad in world-wide reflection from the death of Christ ! ( For here His self-sacrifice shines completed and perfect^ here it is ejjhibited in that tragic and supreme form which in all cases arrests attention and commands respect. Even when a man of wasted life sacrifices himself at last, and in one heroic act saves another by his death, his past life is forgotten or seems to be redeemed by his death, and at all events we own the beauty and the pathos of the r~ deed. A martyr to the faith may have been but a poor creature, narrow, harsh and overbearing, vain and xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 57 vulgar in spirit ; but all the past is blotted out, and our attention is arrested on the blazing pile or the bloody scaftbld. So the death of Christ, though but a part of the self-sacrificing life, yet stands by itself as the cul- mination and seal of that life ; it catches the eye and strikes the mind, and conveys at one view the main impression made by the whole life and character of Him who gave Himself upon the cross. -^ But Christ is no mere hero or teacher sealing his truth with his blood ; nor is it enough to say that His death renders, in a conspicuous form, the perfect self- sacrifice with which He devoted Himself to our good. It is conceivable that in a long-past age some other man should have lived and died for his fellows, and yet we at once recognise that, though the history of such a person came into our hands, we should not be so affected and drawn by it as to choose him as our king and rest upon him the hope of uniting us to one another and to God. Wherein, then, lies the difference ? The dif- ference lies in this — that Christ was the representative of God. This He Himself uniformly claimed to be. He knew He was unique, different from all others ; but He advanced no claim to esteem that did not pass to the Father who sent Him, Always he explained His powers as being the proper equipment of God's repre- sentative. '' The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of Myself." His whole life was the message of God to man, the Word made flesh. His death was but the last syllable of this great utterance — the utterance of God's love for man, the final evidence that nothing is grudged us by God. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. His death draws us because there is in it more than human heroism and self-sacrifice. It draws us because in it 58 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. the very heart of God is laid bare to us. It softens, it breaks us down, by the irresistible tenderness it discloses in the mighty and ever-blessed God. Every man feels it has a message for him, because in it the God and Father of us all speaks to us. It is this which is special to the death of Christ, and which separates it from all other deaths and heroic sacrifices. It has a universal bearing — a bearing upon 'every man, because it is a Divine act, the act of that One who is the God and Father of all men. vin the same century as our Lord many men died in a manner which strongly excites our admiration. Nothing could well be more noble, nothing more pathetic, than Vac fearless and loving spirit in which Roman after Roman met his death. But beyond respectful admiration these heroic deeds win from us no further sentiment. They are the deeds of men who have no connection with us. The well-worn words, " What's Hecuba to me or I to Hecuba?" rise to our lips when we try to fancy any deep connection. But the death of Christ concerns all men without exception, because it is the greatest declarative act of the God of all men. It is the mani- festo all men are concerned to read. It is the act of One with whom all men are already connected in the closest way. And the result of our contemplation of it is, not that we admire, but that we are drawn, are attracted, into new relations with Him whom that death reveals. This death moves and draws us as no other can, because here we get to the very heart of that which most deeply concerns us. Here we learn what our God is and where we stand eternally. He who is nearest us of all, and in whom our life is bound up, reveals Himself; and seeing Him here full of ungrudging and most reliable love, of tenderest and utterly self- xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 59 sacrificing devotedness to us, we cannot but give way to this central attraction, and with all other willing creatures be drawn into fullest intimacy and firmest relations to the God of all. The death of Christ, then, draws men chiefly because God here shows men His sympathy. His love, His trustworthiness. What the sun is in the solar system, "( Christ's death is in the moral world. The sun by its physical attraction binds the several planets together and holds them within range of its light and heat. God, the central intelligence and original moral Being, draws to Himself and holds within reach of His life- giving radiance all who are susceptible ot moral influences ; and He does so through the death of Christ. This is His supreme revelation. Here, if we J may say so with reverence, God is seen at His best — not that at any time or in any action He is different, but here He is seen to be the God of love He ever is. Nothing is better than self-sacrifice : that is the highest point a moral nature can touch. And God, by the sacrifice which is rendered visible on the cross, gives to the moral world a real, actual, immovable centre, round which moral natures will more and more gather, and which will hold them together in self-effacing unity. To complete the idea of the attractiveness of the Cross, it must further be kept in view that this par- ticular form of the manifestation of the Divine love was adapted to the needs of those to whom it was made. To sinners the love of God manifested itself in pro- viding a sacrifice for sin. The death on the cross was not an irrelevant display, but was an act required for ■the removal of the most insuperable obstacles that lay in man's path. The sinner, believing that in the death 6o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. of Christ his sins are atoned for, conceives hope in God and claims the Divine compassion in his own behalf. To the penitent the Cross is attractive as an I open door to the prisoner, or the harbour-heads to the storm-tossed ship. Let us not suppose, then, that we are not welcome to Christ. He desires to draw us to Himself and to form a connection with us. He understands our hesita- tions, our doubts of our own capacity for any steady and enthusiastic loyalty ; but He knows also the power of truth and love, the power of His own person and of His own death to draw and fix the hesitating and wavering soul. And we shall find that as we strive to serve Christ in our daily life it is still His death that holds and draws us. It is His death which gives us compunction in our times of frivolity, or selfishness, or carnality, or rebellion, or unbelief. It is there Christ appears in His own most touching attitude and with His own most irresistible appeal. We cannot further wound One already so wounded in His desire to win us from evil. To strike One already thus nailed to the tree in helplessness and anguish, is more than the hardest heart can do. Our sin, our infidelity, our unmoved contemplation of His love, our blind iridifference to His purpose — these things wound Him more than the spear and the scourge. To rid us of these things was His purpose in dying, and to see that His work is in vain and His sufferings unregarded and unfruitful is the deepest injury of all. It is not to the mere sentiment of pity He appeals : rather He says, " Weep not for Me; weep for yourselves." It is to our power to recognise perfect goodness and to appreciate perfect love. He appeals to our power to see below the surface of things, and through the outer shell of this xii. 27-36.] ATTRACTIVE FORCE OF THE CROSS. 61 world's life to the Spirit of good that is at the root of all and that manifests itself in Him. Here is the true stay of the human soul : " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden " ; "I am come a light into the world : walk in the light." > V. RESULTS OF CHRIST'S MANIFESTATION. 63 "But though He had done so many signs before them, yet they beheved not on Him : that the word of Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, Lord, who hath believed our report ? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed ? For this cause they could not believe, for that Isaiah said again, He hath blinded their eyes, and He hardened their heart ; lest they should see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and should turn, and I should heal them. These things said Isaiah, because he saw His glory ; and he spake of Him. Nevertheless even of the rulers many believed on Him ; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess it, lest they should be put out of the synagogue : for they loved the glory of men more than the glory of God. And Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on Me, believeth not on Me, but on Him that sent Me. And he that beholdeth Me beholdeth Him that sent Me. I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me may not abide in the darkness. And if any man hear My sayings, and keep them not, I judge him not : for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. He that rejecteth Me, and receiveth not My sayings, hath One that judgeth him : the word that I spake, the same shall judge him in the last day. For I spake not from Myself; but the Father which sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life eternal : the things therefore which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I speak." — John xii. 37-50. 64 V. RESULTS OF CHRIST'S MANIFESTATION IN this Gospel the death of Christ is viewed as the first step in His glorification. When He speaks of being " lifted up," there is a double reference in the expression, a local and an ethical reference.^ He is lifted up on the cross, but lifted up on it as His true throne and as the necessary step towards His supremacy at God's right hand. It was, John tells us, with direct reference to the cross that Jesus now used the words : " I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me." The Jews, who heard the words, perceived that, whatever else was contained in them, intimation of His removal from earth was given. But, according to the current Messianic expectation, the Christ " abideth for ever," or at any rate for four hundred or a thousand years. How then could this Person, who announced His immediate departure, be the Christ ? The Old Testament gave them ground for supposing that the Messianic reign would be last- ing ; but had they listened to our Lord's teaching they would haver learned that this reign was spiritual, and not in the form of an earthly kingdom with a visible sovereign. Accordingly, although they had recognised Jesus as ' See iii. 14. VOL. II. 65 c 66 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. the Messiah, they are again stumbled by this fresh declaration of His. They begin to fancy that perhaps after all by calling Himself " the Son of man " He has not meant exactly what they mean by the Messiah. From the form of their question it would seem that Jesus had used the designation "the Son of man" in intimating His departure ; for they say, " How sayest thou. The Son of man must be lifted up ? " Up to this time, therefore, they had taken it for granted that by calling Himself the Son of man He claimed to be the Christ, but now they begin to doubt whether there may not be two persons signified by those titles. Jesus furnishes them with no direct solution of their difficulty. He never betrays any interest in these external identifications. The time for discussing the relation of the Son of man to the Messiah is past. His manifestation is closed. Enough light has been given. Conscience has been appealed to and discus- sion is no longer admissible. "Ye have light: walk in the light." The way to come to a settlement of all their doubts and hesitations is to follow Him. There is still time for that. " Yet a little while is the light among you." But the time is short ; there is none to waste on idle questionings, none to spend on sophis- ticating conscience — time only for deciding as conscience bids. By thus believing in the light they will themselves become " children of light." The " children of light " are those who live in it as their element, — as "the children of this world " are those who wholly belong to this world and find in it what is congenial ; as " the son of perdition " is he who is identified with perdition. The children of light have accepted the revelation that is in Christ, and live in the " day " that the Lord has xii.37-5o] RESULTS OF CHRIST'S MANIFESTATION. 67 made. Christ contains the truth for them — the truth which penetrates to their inmost thought and illu- minates the darkest problems of life. In Christ they have seen that which determines their relation to God ; and that being determined, all else that is of prime importance finds a settlement. To know God and ourselves ; to know God's nature and purpose, and our own capabilities and relation to God, — these con- stitute the light we need for living by ; and this light Christ gives. It was in a dim, uncertain twilight, with feebly shining lanterns, the wisest and best of men sought to make out the nature of God and His pur- poses regarding man ; but in Christ God has made noonday around us. They, therefore, that stood, or that stand, in His presence, and yet recognise no light, must be asleep, or must turn away from an excess of light that is disagreeable or inconvenient. If we are not the fuller of life and joy the more truth we know, if we shrink from admitting the consciousness of a present and holy God, and do not feel it to be the very sunshine of life in which alone we thrive, we must be spiritually asleep or spiritually dead. And this cry of Christ is but another form of the cry that His Church has prolonged : "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." The " little while " of their enjoyment of the light was short indeed, for no sooner had He made an end of these sayings than He " departed, and did hide Him- self from them." He probably found retirement from the feverish, inconstant, questioning crowd with His friends in Bethany. At any rate this removal of the light, while it meant darkness to those who had not received Him and who did not keep His words, could 68 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. bring no darkness to His own, who had received Him and the light in Him. Perhaps the best comment on this is the memorable passage from Comus : "Virtue could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the great sea sunk. He that has light within his own clear breast May sit i' the centre and enjoy bright day ; But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts Benighted walks under the midday sun, Himself is his own dungeon." And now the writer of this Gospel, before entering upon the closing scenes, pauses and presents a sum- mary of the results of all that has been hitherto related. First, he accounts for the unbelief of the Jews. It could not fail to strike his readers as remarkable that, " though He had done so many miracles before the people, yet they believed not in Him." Jn this John sees nothing inexplicable, however sad and significant it may be.' At first sight it is an astounding fact that the very people who had been prepared to recognise and receive the Messiah should not have believed in Him. Might not this to some minds be convinc- ing evidence that Jesus was not the Messiah ? If the same God who sent Him forth had for centuries specially prepared a people to recogiiise and receive Him when He came, was it possible that this people should repudiate Him ? Was it Hkely that such a result should be produced or should be allowed ? But John turns the point of this argument by showing that a precisely similar phenomenon had often appeared in the history of Israel. The old prophets had the very same complaint to make : " Who hath believed our report ? and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed?" The people had habitually, as a people xii.37-5o.] RESULTS OF CHRIST'S MANIFESTATION. 69 with individual exceptions, refused to listen to God's voice or to acknowledge His presence in prophet and providence. Besides, might it not very well be that the blindness and callousness of the Jews in rejecting Jesus was the inevitable issue of a long process of hardening ? If, in former periods of their history, they had proved them- selves unworthy of God's training and irresponsive to it, what else could be expected than that they should reject the Messiah when He came ? This hardening and blinding process was the inevitable, natural result of their past conduct. But what nature does, God does ; and therefore the Evangelist says " they could not believe, because that Esaias said again. He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart ; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart." The organ for perceiving spiritual truth was blinded, and their susceptibility to religious and •moral impressions had become callous and hardened and impervious. . And while this was no doubt true of the people as a whole, still there were not a few individuals who eagerly responded to this last message from God. In the most unlikely quarters, and in circumstances cal- culated to counteract the influence of spiritual forces, some were convinced. "Even among the chief rulers many believed on Him." This belief, however, did not tell upon the mass, because, through fear of excom- munication, those who were convinced dared not utter their conviction. " They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God." They allowed' their relations to men to determine their relation to God. Men were more real to them than God. The praise of men came home to their hearts with a sensible relish that the 70 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. praise of God could not rival. They reaped what they had sown ; they had sought the esteem of men, and now they were unable to find their strength in God's approval. The glory which consisted in following the lowly and outcast Jesus, the glory of fellowship with God, was quite eclipsed b}' the glory of living in the eye of the people as wise and estimable persons. In the last paragraph of the chapter John gives a summary of the claims and message of Jesus. He has told us (ver. 36) that Jesus had departed from public view and had hidden Himself, and he mentions no return to pubHcity. It is therefore probable that in these remaining verses, and before he turns to a some- what different aspect of Christ's ministry, he gives in rapid and brief retrospect the sum of what Jesus had advanced as His claim. He introduces this paragraph, indeed, with the words, "Jesus cried and said"; but as neither time nor place is mentioned, it is quite Hkely that no special time or place is supposed ; and in point of fact each detail adduced in these verses can be paralleled from some previously recorded utterance of Jesus. First, then, as everywhere in the Gospel, so here, He claims to be the representative of God in so close and perfect a manner that "he that believeth on Me, be- lieveth not on Me, but on Him that sent Me, And he that seeth Me, seeth Him that sent Me." No belief terminates in Christ Himself: to believe in Him is to believe in God, because all that He is and does proceeds from God and leads to God. The whole purpose of Christ's manifestation was to reveal God. He did not wish to arrest thought upon Himself, but through Him- self to guide thought to Him whom He revealed. He was sustained by the Father, and all He said and did was xii.37-SO-] RESULTS OF CHRIST'S MANIFESTATION. 71 of the Father's inspiration. Whoever, therefore, " saw " or understood Him "saw" the Father; and whoever believed in Him believed in the Father. Second, as regards men. He is " come a light into the world." Naturally there is in the world no sufficient light. Men feel that they are in darkness. They feel the darkness all the more appalling and depressing the more developed their own human nature is. " More light " has been the cry from the beginning. What are we ? where are we ? whence are we ? whither are we going ? what is there above and beyond this world ? These questions are echoed back from an unanswering void, until Christ comes and gives the answer. Since He came men have felt that they did not any longer walk in darkness. They see where they are going, and they see why they should go. And if it be asked, as among the Jews it certainly must have been asked, why, if Jesus is the Messiah, does He not punish men for rejecting Him ? the answer is, " I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." Judgment, indeed, necessarily results from His coming. Men are divided by His coming. " The words that I have spoken, the same shall judge men in the last day." The offer of God, the offer of righteous- ness, is that which judges men. Why are they still dead, when life has been offered ? This is the con- demnation. " The commandment of the Father is life everlasting." This is the sum of the message of God to men in Christ ; this is " the commandment " which the Father has given Me ; this is Christ's commission : to bring God in the fulness of His grace and love and life-giving power within men's reach. It is to give life eternal to men that God has come to them in Christ. To refuse that life is their condemnation. VI. THE FOOJ-IV ASHING. 73 "Now before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour was come that He should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved His own which were in the world, He loved them unto the end. And during supper, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray Him, Jesus, knowing th^t the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God, riseth from supper, and layeth aside His garments; and He took a towel, and girded Himself. Then He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded. So He cometh to Simon Peter. He saith unto Him, Lord, dost Thou wash my feet ? Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now ; but thou shalt understand hereafter. Peter saith unto Him, Thou shall never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with Me. Simon Peter saith unto Him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him, He that is bathed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit : and ye are clean, but not all. For He knew him that should betray Him ; there- fore said He, Ye are not all clean. So when He had washed their feet, and taken His garments, and sat down again, He said unto them. Know ye what I have _don_e_to you? Ye call Me, Master, and, Lord: and ye say well ; for so I am. If I then, the Lord and the Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye also should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, A servant is not greater than his lord ; neither one that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, blessed are ye if ye do them." — John xiii. 1-17. 74 VI. THE FOOT-WASHING. ST. JOHN, having finished his account of the public manifestation of Jesus, proceeds now to narrate the closing scenes, in which the disclosures He made to " His own " form a chief part. That the transition ] may be observed, attention is drawn to it. At earlier I stages of our Lord,'s ministry He has given as His ^ V. reason for refraining from proposed lines of action that His hour was not come : now He " knew that His hour was come, that He should depart out of this world unto the Father." This indeed was the last evening of His life. Within twenty-four hours He was to be in the tomb. Yet according to this writer it was not the paschal supper which our Lord now partook of with His disciples ; it was " before the feast of the Passover." Jesus being Himself the Paschal Lamb was sacrificed on the day on which the Passover was eaten, and in this and the following chapters we have an account oi the preceding evening. In order to account for what follows, the precise , ^ time is defined in the words '' supper being served " ^ or "supper-time' having arrived"; not, as in the Authorised Version, " supper being ended," which * Compare Mark vi. 2, ytvo/j-evou aa^^arov ; and the Latin " posita mensa." 75 / 76 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. plainly was not the case ; ^ nor, as in the Revised Version, " during supper." The difficulty about wash- ing the feet could not have arisen after or during supper, but only as the guests entered and reclined at table. In Palestine, as in other countries of the same latitude, shoes were not universally worn, and were not worn at all within doors ; and where some protection to the foot was worn, it was commonly a mere sandal, a sole tied on with a thong. The upper part of the foot was thus left exposed, and necessarily became heated and dirty with the fine and scorching dust of the roads. Much discomfort was thus produced, and the first duty of a host was to provide for its removal. A slave was ordered to remove the sandals and wash the feet.^ And in order that this might be done, the guest either sat on the couch appointed for him at table, or reclined with his feet protruding beyond the end of it, that the slave, coming round with the pitcher and basin,^ might pour cool water gently over them. So necessary to comfort was this attention that our Lord reproached the Pharisee who had invited Him to dinner with a breach of courtesy because he had omitted it. On ordinary occasions it is probable that the disciples would perform this humble office by turns, where there was no slave to discharge it for all. But this evening, when they gathered for the last supper, all. took their places at the table with a studied ignorance of the necessity, a feigned unconsciousness that any such attention was required. As a matter of course, the pitcher of cool water, the basin, and the towel had been set as part of the requisite furnishing of the supper chamber ; but no one among the disciples betrayed the ' See ver. 2. '^ {iiroMere, ir aides, /cat aTrovi^eTe. ' The " liisht " and "ibiick" of niodein I'alesliiie. xiii. 1-17.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 77 ^ slightest consciousness that he understood that any such custom existed. Why was this? Because, as / Luke tells us (xxii. 24), " there had arisen among -^ them a contention, which of them is accounted to be the greatest." Beginning, perhaps, by discussing the prospects of their Master's kingdom, they had passed on" to compare the importance of this or that faculty for forwarding the interests of the kingdom, and had ended by easily recognised personal allusions and even the direct pitting of man against man. The assumption of superiority on the part of the sons of Zebedee and others was called in question, and it suddenly appeared how this assumption had galled the rest and rankled in their minds. That such a discussion should arise may be disappointing, but it was natural. All men are jealous \ of their reputation, and crave that credit be given them for their natural talent, their acquired skill, their pro- \ fessional standing, their influence, or at any rate for • their humility. Heated, then, and angry and full of resentment these V men hustle into the supper-room and seat themselves like so many sulky schoolboys. They streamed into the room and doggedly took their places ; and then came a pause. For any one to wash the feet of the rest was_\/ to declare himself the servant of all; and that was precisely what each one was resolved he, for his part, would not do. No one of them had humour enough to see the absurdity of the situation. No one of them was sensitive enough to be ashamed of showing such a temper in Christ's presence. There they sat, looking at the table, looking at the ceiling, arranging their dress, each resolved upon this — that he would not be the man to own himself servant of all. But this unhealthy heat quite unfits them to listen to 78 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. what their Lord has to say to them that last evenmg. Occupied as they are, not with anxiety about Him nor with absorbing desire for the prosperity of His kingdom, but with selfish ambitions that separate them alike from Him and from one another, how can they receive what He has to say ? But how is He to bring them v; into a state of mind in which they can listen wholly and devotedly to Him ? How is He to quench their lieated passions and stir within them humility and love ? " He riseth from the supper-table, and laid aside His garments, and took a towel, and girded Himself. After that He poureth water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the \ towel wherewith He was girded." Each separate ' I action is a fresh astonishment and a deeper shame I to the bewildered and conscience-stricken disciples. " Who is not able to picture the scene, r— the faces of John and James and Peter; the intense silence, in which each movement of Jesus was painfully audible ; the furtive watching of Him, as He rose, to see what He would do ; the sudden pang of self-reproach as they perceived what it meant ; the bitter humiliation and the burning shame ? " But not only is the time noted, in order that we may perceive the relevancy of the foot -washing, but the Evangelist steps aside from his usual custom and de- scribes the mood of Jesus that we may more deeply penetrate into the significance of the action. Around this scene in the supper-chamber St. John sets lights which permit us to see its various beauty and grace. And first of all he would have us notice what seems chiefly to have struck himself as from time to time he reflected on this last evening — that Jesus, even in these last hours, was wholly possessed and governed by love. xiii. 1-17.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 79 Although He knew "that His hour had come, that He ^ should depart out of this world unto the Father, yet having loved His own which were in the world He loved them unto the end." Already the deep darkness of the coming night was touching the spirit of Jesus with its shadow. Already the pain of the betrayal, the lonely desolation of desertion by His friends, the defenceless exposure to fierce, unjust, ruthless men, the untried misery of death and dissolution, the critical trial of His cause and of all the labour of His life, these and many anxieties that cannot be imagined, were pouring in upon His spirit, wave upon wave. If ever ) man might have been excused for absorption in His own V^ affairs Jesus was then that man. On the edge of what j He knew to be the critical passage in the world's '^ history, what had He to do attending to the comfort %/ and adjusting the silly differences of a few unworthy men ? With the weight of a world on His arm, was He to have His hands free for such a trifling atten- tion as this ? With His whole soul pressed with the heaviest burden ever laid on man, was it to be expected ■He should turn aside at such a call ? But His love made it seem no turning aside at all. His love had made Him wholly theirs, and though standing on the brink of death He was disengaged to do them the slightest service. His love was love, ) y^ devoted, enduring, constant. He had loved them, and ' He loved them still. It was their condition which had ' brought Him into the world, and His love for them was that which would carry Him through all that was before Him. The very fact that they showed them- selves still so jealous and childish, so unfit to cope with the world, drew out His affection towards them. He was departing from the world and they were remaining it 80 . THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. in it, exposed to all its opposition and destined to bear the brunt of hostility directed against Him — how then can He but pity and strengthen them ? Nothing is more touching on a death-bed than to see the sufferer hiding and making light of his own pain, and turning the attention of those around him away from him to themselves, and making arrangements, not for his own relief, but for the future comfort of others. This which has often dimmed with tears the eyes of the bystanders struck John when he saw his Master ministering to the wants of His disciples, although He knew that His own hpur had come. Another side-light which serves to bring out the full significance of this action is Jesus' consciousness of His own dignity. "Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto God," riseth from supper, and took a towel and girded Himself. It was not in forget- fulness of His Divine origin, but in full consciousness of it, He discharged this menial function. As He had divested Himself of the " form of God " at the first, stripping Himself of the outward glory attendant on recognised Divinity, and had taken upon Him the form of a servant, so now He "laid aside His garments and girded Himself," assuming the guise of a household slave. For a fisherman to pour water over a fisher- man's feet was no great condescension ; but that He, in whose hands are all human affairs and whose nearest relation is the Father, should thus condescend is of unparalleled significance. It is this kind of action that is suitable to One whose consciousness is Divine. Not only does the dignity of Jesus vastly augment the beauty of the action, but it sheds new light on the Divine character. xiii. i-i;.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 8i Still another circumstance which seemed to John to '\ '^ accentuate the grace of the foot-washing was this — that Judas was among the guests, and that "the devil had now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him." The idea had at last formed itself in Judas' mind that the best use he could make of Jesus was to sell Him to His enemies. His hopes of gain in the Messianic kingdom were finally blighted, but he might still make something out of Jesus and save him- self from all implication in a movement frowned upon by the authorities. He clearly apprehended that all hopes of a temporal kingdom were gone. He had probably not strength of mind enough to say candidly that he had joined the company of disciples on a false understanding, and meant now quietly to return to his trading at Kerioth. If he could break up the whole movement, he would be justified in his dissatisfaction, and would also be held to be a useful servant of the nation. So he turns traitor. And John does not whitewash him, but plainly brands him as a traitor. Now, much may be forgiven a man ; but treachery — what is to be done with it ; with the man who uses the knowledge only a friend can have, to betra}^ you to your enemies ? Suppose Jesus had unmasked him to Peter and the rest, would he ever have left that room alive? Instead of unmasking him, Jesus makes no! ^ difference between him and the others, kneels by his ; couch, takes his feet in His hands, washes and gently dries them. However difficult it is to understand why Jesus chose Judas at the first, there can be no question '< that throughout His acquaintance with him He had done all that was possible to win him. The kind of treatment Judas had received throughout may be inferred from the treatment he received now. Jesus VOL. II. 6 82 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. knew him to be a man of a low type and impenitent ; He knew him to be at that very time out of harmony with the Httle company, false, plotting, meaning to save himself by bringing ruin on the rest. Yet Jesus will not denounce him to the others. His sole weapon is love. Conquests which He cannot achieve with this He will not achieve at all. In the person of Judas the utmost of malignity the world can show is present to Him, and He meets it with kindness. Well may Astie exclaim : " Jesus at the feet of the traitor — what a picture ! what lessons for us ! " Shame and astonishment shut the mouths of the disciples, and not a sound broke the stillness of the room but the tinkle and plash of the water in the basin as Jesus went from couch to couch. But the silence was broken when He came to Peter. The deep reve- rence which the disciples had contracted for Jesus betrays itself in Peter's inability to suffer Him to touch his feet. ' Peter could not endure that the places of master and servant should thus be reversed. He feels that shrinking and revulsion which we feel when a delicate person or one much above us in station pro- ceeds to do some service from which we ourselves would shrink as beneath us. That Peter should have drawn up his feet, started up on the couch, and exclaimed, " Lord, do you actually propose to wash my feet ! " is to his credit, and just what we should have expected of a man who never lacked generous impulses. Our Lord therefore assures him that his scruples will be removed, and that what he could not understand would be shortly explained to him. He treats Peter's scruples very much as He treated the Baptist's when John hesitated about baptizing Him. Let Me, says Jesus, do it now, and I will explain My reason when xiii. I -1 7.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 83 I have finished the washing of you all. But this does not satisfy Peter. Out he comes with one of his blunt and hasty speeches : " Lord, Thou shalt never wash my feet ! " He knew better than Jesus, that is to say, what should be done. Jesus was mistaken in supposing that any explanation could be given of it. Hasty, self- confident, knowing better than anybody else, Peter >-l. V once again ran himself into grave fault. The first requirement in a disciple is entire self-surrender. The others had meekly allowed Jesus to wash their feet, cut to the heart with shame as they were, and scarcely able to let their feet lie in His hands ; but Peter must show himself of a different mind. His first refusal was readily forgiven as a generous impulse ; the second is an obstinate, proud, self-righteous utterance, and was forthwith met by the swift rebuke of Jesus : " If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with Me." Superficially, these words might have been understood as intimating to Peter that, if he wished to partake of the feast prepared, he must allow Jesus to wash his feet. Unless he was prepared to leave the room and reckon himself an outcast from that company, he must submit to the feet-washing which his friends and fellow- guests had submitted to. There was that in the tone of our Lord which awakened Peter to see how great and painful a rupture this would be. He almost hears in the words a sentence of expulsion pronounced on himself; and as rapidly as he had withdrawn from the I touch of Christ, so rapidly does he now run to the \ opposite extreme and offer his whole body to be washed — "not my feet only, but my hands and my head." If this washing means that we are Thy friends and part- ners, let me be all washed, for every bit of me is Thine. Here again Peter was swayed by blind impulse, and 84 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. here again he erred. If he could only have been quiet 1 If he could only have held his tongue ! If only he could have allowed his Lord to manage without his interference and suggestion at every point ! But this was precisely what Peter had as yet not learned to do. In after-years he was to learn meekness ; he was to learn to submit while others bound him and carried him whither they would ; but as yet that was impossible to him. His Lord's plan is never good enough for him ; Jesus is never exactly right. What He proposes must always be eked out by Peter's superior wisdom. What gusts of shame must have stormed through Peter's soul when he looked back on this scene ! Yet it concerns us rather to admire than to condemn Peter's fervour. How welcome to our Lord as He passed from the cold and treacherous heart of Judas must this burst of enthusiastic devotion have been ! " Lord, if washing be any symbol of my being Thine, wash hands and head as well as feet." Jesus throws a new light upon His action in His I reply : " He that is washed, needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit : and ye are clean, but not all." The words would have more readily disclosed Christ's meaning had they been literally rendered : He that has bathed needeth not save to wash his feet. The daily use of the bath rendered it needless to wash more than the feet, which were soiled with walking from the bath to the supper-chamber. But that Christ had in view as He washed the disciples' feet something more than the mere bodily cleansing and comfort is plain from His remark that they were not all clean. All had enjoyed the feet-washing, but all were not clean. The feet of Judas were as clean as the feet of John or Peter, but his heart was foul. And what xiii. i-iy.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 85 Christ intended when He girt Himself with the towel and took up the pitcher was not merely to wash the soil from their feet, but to wash from their hearts the hard and proud feelings which were so uncongenial to that night of communion and so threatening to His cause. Far more needful to their happiness at the feast than the comfort of cool and clean feet was their restored affection and esteem for one another, and that humility that takes the lowest place. Jesus could very well have eaten with men who were unwashed ; but He could not eat with men hating one another, glaring fiercely across the table, declining to answer or to pass what they were asked for, showing in every way malice and bitterness of spirit. He knew that at bottom they were good men ; He knew that with one • , exception they -loved Him and one another; He knew 1 ^ that as a whole they were clean, and that this vicious J ^ j^ temper in which they at present entered the room was but the soil contracted for the hour. But none the less must it be washed off. And He did effectually wash it off by washing their feet. For was there a man among them who, when he saw his Lord and Master stooping at his couch-foot, would not most gladly have changed places with Him ? Was there one of them who was not softened and broken down by the action of the Lord ? Is it not certain that shame must have cast out pride from every heart; that the feet would be very little thought of, but that the change of feel- ing would be marked and obvious ? From a group of angry, proud, insolent, implacable, resentful men,^ they were in five minutes changed into a company of humbled, meek, loving disciples of the Lord, each thinking hardly of himself and esteeming others better. They were effectually cleansed from the stain they had 86 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. contracted, and could enter on the enjoyment of the Last Supper with pure conscience, with restored and increased affection for one another, and with deepened adoration for the marvellous wisdom and all-accom- plishing grace of their Master. Jesus, then, does not mistake present defilement for habitual impurity, nor partial stain for total unclean- \ ness. He knows whom He has chosen. He under- stands the difference between deep-seated alienation of spirit and the passing mood which for the hour disturbs friendship. He discriminates between Judas and Peter : between the man who has not been in the bath, and the man whose feet are soiled in walking from it ; between him who is at heart unmoved and unimpressed by His love, and him who has for a space fallen from the consciousness of it. He does not sup- pose that because we have sinned this morning we have no real root of grace in us. He knows the heart we bear Him ; and if just at present unworthy feelings prevail, He does not misunderstand as men may, and straightway dismiss us from His company. He recog- nises that our feet need washing, that our present stain must be removed, but not on this account does He think we need to be all washed and have never been right in heart towards Him. These present stains, then, Christ seeks to remove, that our fellowship with Him may be unembarrassed ; and that our heart, restored to humility and tenderness, may be in a state to receive the blessing He would I bestow. It is not enough to be once forgiven, to begin the day " clean every whit." No sooner do we take a ' step in the life of the day than our footfall raises a little puff of dust which does not settle without sullying us. Our temper is ruffled, and words fall from our lips xiii. I-I7.] THE FOOT-WASHING. 87 that injure and exasperate. In one way or other stain attaches to our conscience, and we are moved away from cordial and open fellowship with Christ. All this happens to those who are at heart as truly Christ's friends as those first disciples. But we must have these stains washed away even as they had. Humbly we must own them, and humbly accept their forgive- ness and rejoice in their removal. As these men had with shame to lay their feet in Christ's hands, so must we. As His hands had to come in contact with the soiled feet of the disciples, so has His moral nature to come in contact with the sins from which He cleanses us. His heart is purer than were His hands, and He shrinks more from contact with moral than with physical pollution ; and yet without ceasing we bring Him into contact with such pollution. When we consider what those stains actually are from which we must ask Christ to wash us, we feel tempted to exclaim with Peter, " Lord, Thou shalt never wash my feet ! " As these men must have shivered with shame through all their nature, so do we when we see Christ stoop before us to wash away once again the defilement we have contracted ; when we lay our feet soiled with the miry and dusty ways of life in His sacred hands ; when we see the uncomplaining, unreproachful grace with which He performs for us this lowly and painful office. But only thus are we prepared for communion with Him and with one another. Only by admitting that we need cleansing, and by humbly allowing Him to cleanse us, are we brought into true fellowship with Him. With the humble and contrite spirit -which has thrown down all barriers of pride and freely admits His love and rejoices in His holiness does He abide. Whoso sits down at Christ's table must sit down clean ; he THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. may not have come clean, even as those first guests were not clean, but he must allow Christ to cleanse him, must honestly suffer Christ to remove from his heart, from his desire and purpose, all that He counts defiling. But our Lord was not content to let His action speak for itself; He_expressly explains (vv. 12-17) the r'^meaning of what He had now done. He meant that 'p. --[ they should learn to wash one another's feet, to be yOl ^humble and ready to be of service to one another even ■^ ^when to serve seemed to compromise their dignity.^ No disciple of Christ need go far to find feet that need washing, feet that are stained or bleeding with the hard ways that have been trodden. To recover men from the difficulties into which sin or misfortune has brought them — to wipe off some of the soil from men's lives — to make them purer, sweeter, readier to listen to Christ, even unostentatiously to do the small services which each' hour calls for — is to follow Him who girt Himself with the slave's apron. As often as we thus condescend we become like Christ. By putting Him- self in the servant's place, our Lord has consecrated all service. The disciple who next washed the feet of the rest would feel that he was representing Christ, and would suggest to the minds of the others the action of J^ their Lord ; and as often as we lay aside the conven- ' tional dignity in which we are clad, and gird ourselves to do what others despise, we feel that we are doing what Christ would do, and are truly representing Him. ' For the formal Foot-washing by the Lord High Almoner, the Pope, or other officials, see Augustine's Letters LV. ; Herzpg art. Fuss- waschting ; Smith's Did. of Christian Antiq. art. Ahrundy Thursday. VII. JUDAS. 89 " I speak not of you all : I know whom I have chosen : but that the Scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth My bread lifted up his heel against Me. From henceforth I tell you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe that I am He. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that receiveth whomsoever I send receiveth Me ; and he that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me. When Jesus had thus said, He was troubled in the spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray Me. The disciples looked one on another, doubting of whom He spake. There was at the table reclining in Jesus' bosom one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved. Simon Peter therefore beckoneth to him, and saith unto him, Tell us who it is of whom He speaketh. He leaning back, as he was, on Jesus' breast saith unto Him, Lord, who is it ? Jesus therefore answereth. He it is, for whom I shall dip the sop, and give it to him. So when He had dipped the sop, He taketh and giveth it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot. And after the sop, then entered Satan into him. Jesus therefore saith unto him. That th«u doest, do quickly. Now no man at the table knew for what intent He spake this unto him. For some thought, because Judas had the bag, that Jesus said unto him, Buy what things we have need of for the feast ; or, that he should give something to the poor. He then having received the sop went out straightway : and it was night." — ^John xiii. 18-30. 90 VII. JUDAS. WHEN Jesus had washed the disciples' feet, apparently in dead silence save for the inter- ruption of Peter, He resumed those parts of His dress He had laid aside, and reclined at the table already spread for the supper. As the meal began, and while He was explaining the meaning of His act and the lesson He desired them to draw from it, John, who lay next Him at table, saw that His face did not wear the expression of festal joy, nor even of untroubled com- posure, but was clouded with deep concern and grief The reason of this was immediately apparent : already, while washing Peter's feet, He had awakened the atten- tion and excited the consciences of the disciples by hinting that on some one of them at least, if not on more, uncleansed guilt still lay, even though all partook in the symbolic washing. And now in His explanation of the foot-washing He repeats this limitation and warn- ing, and also points at the precise nature of the guilt, though not yet singling out the guilty person. " I speak not of you all ; I know whom I have chosen ; I have not been deceived : but it was necessary that this part of God's purpose be fulfilled, and that this Scripture, 'He that eateth bread with Me, hath lifted up his heel against Me,' receive accomplishment in Me." 91 92 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. It was impossible that Jesus should undisturbedly eat out of the same dish with the man whom He knew to have already sold Him to the priests ; it were unfair to the other disciples and a violence to His own feehngs to allow such a man any longer to remain in their company. But our Lord does not name the traitor and denounce him ; he singles him out and sends him from the table on his hateful mission by a process that left every man at the table unaware on what errand : he was despatched. In this process there were three steps. First of all, our Lord indicated that among the disciples there was a traitor. With dismay these true-hearted men hear the firmly pronounced state- ment "one o^ you shall betray Me" (ver. 2i). All of them, as another Evangelist informs us, were exceeding sorrowful, and looked on one another in bewilderment ; and unable to detect the conscious look of guilt in the face of any of their companions, or to recall any cir- cumstance which might fix even suspicion on any of them, each, conscious of the deep, unfathomed capacity for evil in his own heart, can but frankly ask of the Master, "Lord, is it I?" It is a question that at once proves their consciousness of actual innocence and possible guilt. It was a kindness in the Lord to give these genuine men, who were so shortly to go through v^' . trial for His sake, an opportunity of discovering how much they loved Him and how closely knit their hearts had really become to Him. This question of theirs expressed the deep pain and shame that the very thought of the possibility of their being false to Him gave them. They must at all hazards be cleared of this charge. And from this shock of the very idea of being untrue their hearts recoiled towards Him with an enthusiastic tenderness that made this moment \ xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 93 possibly as moving a passage as any that occurred that eventful night. But there was one of them that did not join in the question " Lord, is it I ? " — else must not our Lord have broken silence ? The Twelve are still left in doubt, none noticing in the eagerness of questioning who has not asked, each only glad to know he himself is not charged. The second step in the process is recorded in the 26th chapter of Matthew, where we read that, when the disciples asked " Lord, is it I ? " Jesus answered, " He >\ that dippeth his hand with Me in the dish, the same shall betray Me." It was a large company, and there were necessarily several dishes on the table, so that probably there were three others using the same dish as our Lord : John we know was next Him ; Peter was near enough tQ John to make signs and whisper to him ; Judas was also close to Jesus, a position which he either always occupied as treasurer and purveyor of the company, or into which he thrust himself this evening with the purpose of more effectually screening himself from suspicion. The circle of suspicion is thus narrowed to the one or two who were not only so intimate as to be eating at the same table, but as to be dipping in the same dish. The third step in the process of discovery went on almost simultaneously with this. The impatient Peter, who had hmiself so often unwittingly given offence to his Master, is resolved to find out definitely who is pointed at, and yet dare not say to Christ " Who is it ? " He beckons therefore to John to ask Jesus privately, as he lay next to Jesus. John leans a little back towards Jesus and puts in a whisper the definite question " Who is it ? " and Jesus in the ear of the beloved disciple whispers the reply, " He it is to whom 94 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. I shall give a sop when I have dipped it." And when He had dipped the sop, He gave it to Judas Iscariot. This reveals to John, bxit to no one else, who the traitor was, for the giving of the sop was no more at that table than the handing of a plate or the offer of any article of food is at any table. John alone knew the significance of it. But Judas had already taken alarm at the narrowing of the circle of suspicion, and had possibly for the moment ceased dipping in the same dish with Jesus, lest he should be identified with the traitor. Jesus therefore dips for him and offers him the sop which he will not himself take, and the look that accompanies the act, as well as the act itself, shows Judas that his treachery is discovered. He therefore mechanically takes up in a somewhat colder form the question of the rest, and says, " Master, is it I ? " His fear subdues his voice to a whisper, heard only by John and the Lord ; and the answer, " Thou hast said.- That thou doest, do quickly," is equally unobserved by the rest. Judas need fear no violence at their hands ; John alone knows the meaning of his abrupt rising and hurrying from the room, and John sees that Jesus wishes him to go unobserved. The rest, therefore, thought only that Judas was going out to make some final purchases that had been forgotten, or to care for the poor in this season of festivity. But John saw differently. " The traitor," he says, " went immediately out ; and it was night." As his ill-omened, stealthy figure glided from the chamber, the sudden night of the Eastern twilightless sunset had fallen on .the company; sadness, silence, and gloom fell upon '^ J John's spirit ; the hour of darkness had at length fallen (^ in the very midst of this quiet feast. This sin of Judas presents us with one of the most xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 95 perplexed problems of life and character that the strange circumstances of this world have ever pro- duced. Let us first of all look at the connection of this betrayal with the life of Christ, and then consider the phase of character exhibited in Judas. In connec- tion with the life of Christ the difficulty is to under- stand why the death of Christ was to be brought about in this particular way of treachery among His own followers. It may be said that it came to pass " that Scripture might be fulfilled," that this special predic- tion in the 41st Psalm might be fulfilled. But why was such a prediction made ? It was of course the event which determined the prediction, not the pre- diction which determined the event. Was it, then, an accident that Jesus should be handed over to the authorities in this particular way ? Or was there any significance in it, that justifies its being made so prominent in the narrative ? Certainly if our Lord was to be brought into contact with the most painful form of sin. He must have experience of treachery.. He had known the sorrow that death brings to the survivors ; He had known the pain and disappointment of being resisted by stupid, obstinate, bad-hearted men ; but if He was to know the utmost of misery which man can inflict upon man, He must be brought into contact with one who could accept His love, eat His bread, press His hand with assurance of fidelity, and then sell Him. When we endeavour to set before our minds a clear idea of the character of Judas, and to understand how such a character could be developed, we have to acknowledge that we could desire a few more facts in order to certify us of what we can now only conjec- ture. Obviously we must start from the idea that 96 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. with extraordinary capacity for wickedness Judas had also more than ordinary leanings to what was good. He was an Apostle, and had, we must suppose, been called to that office by Christ under the impression that he possessed gifts which would make him very service- able to the Christian community. He was himself so impressed with Christ as to follow Him : making those pecuniary sacrifices of which Peter boastfully spoke, and which must have been specially sore to Judas. It is possible, indeed, that he may have followed Jesus as a speculation, hoping to receive wealth and honour in the new kingdom ; but this motive mingled with the attachment to Christ's person which all the Apostles had, and mingles in a different form with the disciple- ship of all Christians. With this motive, therefore, there probably mingled in the mind of Judas a desire to be with One who could shield him from evil influ- ences ; he judged that with Jesus he would find continual aid against his weaker nature. Possibly he wished by one bold abandonment of the world to get rid for ever of his covetousness. That Judas was trusted by the other Apostles is manifest from the fact that to him they committed their common fund, — not to John, whose dreamy ayd abstracted nature ill fitted him for minute practical affairs ; not to Peter, whose impulsive nature might often have landed the little company in diffi- culties ; not even to Matthew, accustomed a's he was to accounts ; but to Judas, who had the economical habits, the aptitude for finance, the love of bargaining, which regularly go hand in hand with the love of money. This practical faculty for finance and for affairs generally might, if rightly guided, have become a most serviceable element in the Apostolate, and might have enabled Judas more successfully than any other xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 97 of the Apostles to mediate between the Church and the world. That Judas in all other respects conducted himself circumspectly is proved by the fact that, though other Apostles incurred the displeasure of Christ and were rebuked by Him, Judas committed no glaring fault till this last week. Even to the end he was unsuspected by his fellow-Apostles ; and to the end he had an active conscience. His last act, were it not so awful, would inspire us with something like respect for him : he is overwhelmed with remorse and shame ; his sense of guilt is stronger even than the love of money that had hitherto been his strongest passion : he judges himself fairly, sees what he has become, and goes to his own place ; recognises as not every man does recognise what is his fit habitation, and goes to it. But this man,' with his good impulses, his resolute will, his enlightened conscience, his favouring circum- stances, his frequent feelings of affection towards Christ and desire to serve Him, committed a crime so un- paralleled in wickedness that men practically make .very little attempt to estimate it or measure it with sins of their own. Commonly we think of it as a special, exceptional wickedness — not so much the natural product of a heart like our own and what may be reproduced by ourselves, as the work of Satan using a man as his scarcely responsible tool to effect a pur- pose which needs never again to be effected. If we ask what precisely it was in the crime of Judas that makes us so abhor it, manifestly its most hateful ingredient was its treachery. " It was not an enemy that reproached me ; then I could have borne it ; but it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance." Caesar defended himself till the dagger of a friend pierced him ; then in indignant grief VOL. II. 7 98 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. he covered his head with his mantle and accepted his fate. You can forgive the open blow of a declared enemy against whom you are on your guard ; but the man that lives with you on terms of the greatest inti- macy for years, so that he learns your ways and habits, the state of your affairs and your past history— the man whom you so confide in and like that you com- municate to him freely much that you keep hidden from others, and who, while still professing friendship, uses the information he has gained to blacken your character and ruin your peace, to injure your family or damage your business, — this man, you know, has much to repent of So one can forgive the Pharisees who knew not what they did, and were throughout the declared opponents of Christ ; but Judas attached him- self to Christ, knew that His life was one of unmixed benevolence, was conscious that Christ, would have given up anything to serve him, felt moved and proud from time to time by the fact that Christ loved him, and yet at the last used all these privileges of friend- ship against his Friend. And Judas did not scruple to use this power that only the love of Jesus could have given him, to betray Him to men whom he knew to be unscrupulous and resolved to destroy Him, The garden where the Lord prayed for His enemies was not sacred to Judas ; the cheek that a seraph would blush to kiss, and to salute which was the beginning of joy eternal to the devout disciple, was mere common clay to this man into whom Satan had entered. The crime of Judas is invested with a horror altogether its own by the fact that this Person whom he betrayed was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, the Best-beloved of God and every man's Friend. The greatest blessing that God had ever given xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 99 to earth Judas was forward to reject : not altogether unaware of the majesty of Christ, Judas presumed to use Him in a Httle money-making scheme of his own. The best use that Judas could think of putting Jesus to, the best use he could make of Hiiu whom all angels worship, was to sell Him for ^^5/ He could get nothing more out of Christ than that. After three years' acquaintanceship and observation of the various ways in which Christ could bless people, this was all he could get from Him. And there are still such men : men for whom there is nothing in Christ ; men who can find nothing in Him that they sincerely care for ; men who, though calling themselves His followers, would, if truth were told, be better content and feel they had more substantial profit if they could turn Him into money. So difficult is it to comprehend how any man who had lived as the friend of Jesus could find it in his heart to betray Him, should resist the touching expres- sions of love that were shown him, and brave the awful warning uttered at the supper-table — so difficult is it to suppose that any man, however infatuated, would so deliberately sell his soul for £^, that a theory has been started to explain the crime by mitigating its guilt. It has been supposed that when he delivered up his Master into the hands of the chief priests he expected that our Lord would save Himself by a miracle. He knew that Jesus meant to proclaim a kingdom ; he had been waiting for three years now, eagerly expect- ing that this proclamation and its accompanying gains would arrive. Yet he feared the opportunity was once more passing : Jesus had been brought into the city in triumph, but seemed indisposed to make use of this ' More exactly, £2) 'O 8> the legal value of a slave. THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. popular excitement for any temporal advantage. Judas was weary of this inactivity : might he not himself bring matters to a crisis by giving Jesus into the hands of His enemies, and thus forcing Him to reveal His real power and assert by miracle His kingship? In cor- roboration of this theory, it is said that it is certain that Judas did not expect Jesus to be condemned ; for when he saw that he was condemned he repented of his act. This seems a shallow view to take of Judas' remorse, and a feeble ground on which to build such a theory. A crime seems one thing before, another after, its commission. The murderer expects and wishes to kill his victim, but how often is he seized with an agony of remorse as soon as the blow is struck ? Before we sin, it is the gain we see ; after we sin, the guilt. It is impossible to construe the act of Judas into a mis- taken act of friendship or impatience ; the terms in which he is spoken of in Scripture forbid this idea ; and one cannot suppose that a keen-sighted man like Judas could expect that, even supposing he did force our Lord to proclaim Himself, his own share in the business would be rewarded. He could not suppose this after the terrible denunciation and explicit state- ment that still rang in his ears when he hanged him- self: "The Son of man goeth as it is written of Him : but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed ! it had been good for that man if he had not been born." We must then abide by the more commonplace view of this crime. The only mitigating circumstance that can be admitted is, that possibly among the many perplexed thoughts entertained by Judas he may have supposed that Jesus would be acquitted, or would at least not be punished with death. Still, this being xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS 101 admitted, the fact remains that he cared so little for the love of Christ, and regarded so little the good He was doing, and had so little common honour in him, that he sold his Master to His deadly enemies. And this monstrous wickedness is to be accounted for mainly by his love of money. Naturally covetous, he fed his evil disposition during those years he carried the bag for the disciples : while the rest are taken up with more spiritual matters, he gives more of his thought than is needful to the matter of collecting as much as possible ; he counts it his special province to protect himself and the others against all " the probable emer- gencies and changes of life." This he does, regardless of the frequent admonitions he hears from the Lord addressed to others ; and as he finds excuses for his own avarice in the face of these admonitions, and hardens himself against the better impulses that are stirred within him by the words and presence of Christ, his covetousness roots itself deeper and deeper in his soul. Add to this, that now he was a disap- pointed man : the other disciples, finding that the king- dom of Christ was to be spiritual, were pure and high-minded enough to see that their disappointment was their great gain. The love of Christ had trans- formed them, and to be like Him was enough for them ; but Judas still clung to the idea of earthly grandeur and wealth, and finding Christ was not to give him these he was soured and embittered. He saw that now, since that scene at Bethany the week before, his covet- ousness and earthliness would be resisted and would also betray him. He felt that he "could no longer endure this poverty-stricken life, and had some rage at himself and at Christ that he had been inveigled into it by what he might be pleased to say to himself THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. were false pretences. His self-restraint, he felt, w. breaking down ; his covetousness was getting the bet of him; he felt that he must break with Christ a His followers; but in doing so he would at once a what he had lost during these years of poverty, .' also revenge himself on those who had kept him p( and finally would justify his own conduct in desert' •■ this society by exploding it and causing it to c( isf from among men. The sin of Judas, then, first of all teaches us great power and danger of the love of money, mere thirty pieces of silver would not have been enr .;• to tempt Judas to commit so dastardly and bla '. d. crime; but he was now an embittered and desperate man, and he had become so by allowing money to be all in all to him for these last years of his life. For the danger of this passion consists very much in this — that it infallibly eats out of the soul every generous emotion and high aim : it is the failing of a sordid nature — a little, mean, earthly nature — a failing which, like all others, may be extirpated through God's grace, but which is notoriously difficult to extirpate, and which notoriously is accompanied by or produces other features of character which are among the most repulsive. one meets. The love of money is also dangerous, because it can be so easily gratified ; all that we do in the world .day by day is in the case of most of us connected with money, so that we have continual and not only occasional oppor- tunity of sinning if we be inclined to the sin. Other passions are appealed to only now and again, but our employments touch this passion at all points. It leaves no long intervals, as other passions do, for repentance and amendment; but steadily, constantly, little by little, increases in force. Judas had his fingers in the bag xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 103 all day ; it was under his pillow and he dreamt upon it all night ; and it was this that accelerated his ruin. And by this constant appeal it is sure to succeed at one time or other, if we be open to it. Judas could not suppose that his quiet self-aggrandisement by pilfering little coins from the bag could ever bring him to commit such a crime against his Lord : so may every covetous person fancy that his sin is one that is his own busi- ness, and will not damage his religious profession and ruin his soul as some wild lust or reckless infidelity would do. But Judas and those who sin with him in making continually little gains to which they have no right are wrong in supposing their sin is less dangerous ; and for this reason — that covetousness is more a sin of the will than sins of the flesh or of a passionate nature ; there is more choice in it ; it is more the sin of the whole man unresisting ; and therefore it, above all others, is called idolatry — it, above all others, proves that the man is in his heart choosing the world and not God. There- fore it is that even our Lord Himself spoke almost despairingly, certainly quite differently, of covetous men in comparison with other sinners. Disappointment in Christ is not an unknown thing among ourselves. Men still profess to be Christians who are so only in the degree in which Judas was. They expect some good from Christ, but not all. They attach themselves to Christ in a loose, conventional way, expecting that, though they are Christians, they need not lose anything by their Christianity, nor make any great efforts or sacrifices. They retain command of their own life, and are prepared to go with -Christ only so far as they find it agreeable or inviting. The eye of an observer may not be able to distinguish them from Christ's true followers ; but the distinction is present 104 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. and is radical. They are seeking to use Christ, and are not wilhng to be used by Him. They are not wholly and heartily His, but merely seek to derive some influences from Him. The result is that they one day find that, through all their religious profession and apparent^ Christian life, their characteristic sin has actually been gaining strength. And finding this, they turn upon Christ with disappointment and rage in their hearts, because they become aware that they have lost both this world and the next — have lost many pleasures and gains they might have enjoyed, and yet have gained no spiritual attainment. They find that the reward of double-mindedness is the most absolute perdition, that both Christ and the world, to be made anything of, require the whole man, and that he who tries to get the good of both gets the good of neither. And when a man awakes to see that this is the result of his Christian profession, there is no deadliness of hatred to which the bitter disappointment of his soul will not carry him. He has himself been a dupe, and he calls Christ an impostor. He know himself to be damned, and he says there is no salvation in Christ. But to this disastrous issue any cherished sin may also in its own way lead ; for the more comprehensive lesson -which this sin of Judas brings with it is the rapidity of sin's growth and the enormous proportions it attains when the sinner is sinning against light, when he is in circumstances conducive to holiness and still sins. To discover the wickedest of men, to see the utmost of human guilt, we must look, not among the heathen, but among those who know God ; not among the profligate, dissolute, abandoned classes of society, but among the Apostles. The good that was in Judas led him to join Christ, and kept him associated xiii. 18-30.] JUDAS. 105 with Christ for some years ; but the devil of covetous- ness that was cast out for a while returned and brought with him seven devils worse than himself. There was everything in his position to win him to unworldliness : the men he lived with cared not one whit for comforts or anything that money could buy ; but instead of catching their spirit he took advantage of their care- lessness. He was in a public position, liable to detection ; but this, instead of making him honest perforce, made him only the more crafty and studiedly hypocritical. The solemn warnings of Christ, so far from intimidating him, only made him more skilful in evading all good influence, and made the road to hell easier. The position he enjoyed, and by which he might have been for ever enrolled among the foremost of mankind, one of the twelve foundations of the eternal city, he so skilfully misused that the greatest sinner feels glad that he has yet not been left to commit the sin of Judas. Had Judas not followed Christ he could never have attained the pinnacle of infamy on which he now for ever stands. In all probability he would have passed his days as a small trader with false weights in the little town of Kerioth, or, at the worst, might have developed into an extortionous publican, and have passed into oblivion with the thousands of unjust men who have died and been at last forced to let go the money that should long ago have belonged to others. Or had Judas followed Christ truly, then there lay before him the noblest of all lives, the most blessed of destinies. But he followed Christ and yet took his sin with him : and thence his ruin. VIII. JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. 107 " When therefore he was gone out, Jesus saith, Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in Him ; and God shall glorify Him in Himself, and straightway shall He glorify Him. Little children, yet a little while I am with you. Ye shall seek Me : and as I said unto the Jews, Whither I go, ye cannot come ; so now I say unto you. A new commandn\ent I give unto you, that ye love one another ; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another. Simon Peter saith unto Him, Lord, whither goest Thou ? Jesus answered, Whither I go, thou canst not follow Me now ; but thou shalt follow afterwards. Peter saith unto Him, Lord, why cannot I follow Thee even now ? 1 will lay down my life for Thee. Jesus answereth, Wilt thou lay down thy life for Me ? Verily, verily, I say unto thee. The cock shall not crow, till thou hast denied Me thrice. Let not your heart be troubled : ye believe in God, believe also -in Me. In My Father's house are many mansions ; if it were not so, I would have told you ; for I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I come again, and will receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. And whither I go, ye know the way." — ^JOHN xiii. 31 — xiv. 4. 108 VIII. JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. WHEN Judas glided out of the supper-room on his terrible mission, a weight seemed to be lifted from the spirit of Jesus. The words which fell from Him, however, indicated that He not only felt the relief of being rid of a disturbing element in the company, but tha't He recognised that a crisis in His( own career had been reached and successfully passed ' ' through. " Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in Him." In sending Judas forth He had in point of fact delivered Himself to death. He had .taken the step which cannot be withdrawn, and He is conscious of taking it in fulfilment of the will of the Father. The conflict in His own mind is revealed only by the decision of the victory. No man in soundness of body and of mind can voluntarily give himself to die without seeing clearly other possibilities, and without feeling it to be a hard and painful thing to relinquish life. Jesus had made up His mind. His death is the beginning of His glorification. In choosing the cross He chooses the crown. " The Son of man is glorified " in His perfect self-sacrifice that wins all men to Him ; and God is glorified in Him because this sacrifice is a tribute at once to the justice and the love of God. The Cross reveals God as nothine else does. 109 J no THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN Not only has this decision glorified the Son of man and God through Him and in Him, but as a conse- quence " God will glorify " the Son of man " in Himself." He will lift Him to participation in the Divine glory. It was well that the disciples should know that this would " straightway " result from all that their Master was now to pass through ; that the perfect sympathy with the Father's will which He was now showing would be rewarded by permanent partici- pation in the authority of God. It must be through such an one as their Lord, who is absolutely at one with God, that God fulfils His purpose towards men. By this life and death of perfect obedience, of absolute devotedness to God and man, Christ necessarily wins dominion over human affairs and exercises a deter- mining influence on all that is to be. In all that Christ did upon earth God was glorified ; His . holiness, His fatherly love were manifested to men : in all that God now does upon earth Christ will be glorified ; the uniqueness and power of His life will become more manifest, the supremacy of His Spirit be more and more apparent. This glorification was not the far-off result of the impending sacrifice. It was to date from the present hour and to begin in the sacrifice. God will glorify Him " straightway." " Yet a little while " was He to be with His disciples. Therefore does He tenderly address them, recognising their incompetence, their inability to stand alone, as " little children " ; and in view of the exhibition of bad feeling, and even of treachery, which the Twelve had at that very hour given. His commandment, " Love one another," comes with a tenfold significance. I am leaving you. He says : put away, then, all heart-burnings and jealousies ; xiii.3i— xiv.4.] JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE, in cling together ; do not let quarrels and envyings divide you. This was to be their safeguard when He left them and went where they could not come. " A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another." The commandment to love our neighbour as our- selves was no new commandment. But to love "as \. JJ- I have loved you " was so new that its practice was enough to identify a man as a disciple of Christ. The manner and the measure of the love that is possible and that is commanded could not even be understood until Christ's love was revealed. But probably what Jesus had even more directly in view was the love that ( v was to bind His followers together^ and make them ■ one solid body. It was on their mutual attachment that the very existence of the Christian Church depended ; and this love of men to one another spring- ing out of the love of Christ for them, and because of their acknowledgment and love of a common Lord, was a new thing in the world. The bond to Christ proved itself stronger than all other ties, and those who cherished a com.mon love to Him were drawn to one another more closely than even to blood relations. In fact, Christ, by His love for men, has created a new bond, and that the strongest by which men can be bound to one another. As the Christian Church is a new institution upon earth, so is the principle which forms it a new principle. The principle has, indeed, too often been hidden from sight, if not smothered, by the institution ; too little has love been regarded as the one ' " That ye love one anotJier " is the twice-expreaed commandment. THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. thing by which the disciple of Christ is to be recognised, the one note of the true Church. But that this form of love was a new thing upon earth is apparent/ Tenderly as Jesus made the announcement of His departure, it filled the minds of the disciples with con- sternation. Even the buoyant and hardy Peter felt for the moment staggered by the intelligence, and still more by the announcement that he was not able to accompany his Lord. He was assured that one day he should follow Him, but at present this was impos- sible. This, Peter considered a reflection upon his courage and fidelity ; and although his headlong self- confidence had only a few minutes before been so severely rebuked, he exclaims, " Lord, why cannot I follow Thee now ? I will lay down my life for Thy sake." This was the true expression of Peter's present feeling, and he was allowed in the end to give proof that these vehement words were not mere bluster. But as yet he had not at all apprehended the separate- ness of his Lord and the uniqueness of His work. He did not know precisely what Jesus alluded to, but he thought a strong arm would not be out of place in any conflict that was coming. The offers which even true fidelity makes are often only additional hindrances to our Lord's purposes, and additional burdens for Him to bear. On Himself alone must He depend. No ' " Any Church that professes to be t/ie Church of Christ cannot be that Church. The true Church refuses to be circumscribed or parted by any denominational wall. It knows that Christ is repudiated when His people are repudiated. Not even a Biblical creed can yield satis- factory evidence that a specified Church is the true Church. True Christians are those who love one another across denominational differences, and exhibit the spirit of Him who gave Himself to death upon the cross that His murderers might live." xiii.3i— xiv.4.] JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. 113 man can counsel Him, and none can aid save by first receiving from Him His own spirit. Peter thus rebuked falls into unwonted silence, and takes no further part in the conversation. The rest, knowing that Peter has more courage than any of them, fear that if he is thus to fall it cannot be hope- ful for themselves. They feel that if they are left without Jesus they have no strength to make head against the rulers, no skill in argument such as made Jesus victorious when assailed by the scribes, no popular eloquence which might enable them to win the people. Eleven more helpless men could not well be. " Sheep without a shepherd " was not too strong an expression to depict their weakness and want of in- fluence, their incompetence to effect anything, their inability even tq keep together, Christ was their bond of union and the strength of each of them. It was to be with Him that they had left all. And in forsaking all — father and mother, wife and children, home and kindred and calling — they had found in Christ that hundredfold more even in this life which He had promised. He had so won their hearts, there was about Him something so fascinating, that they felt no loss when they enjoyed His presence, and feared no danger in which He was their leader. They had perhaps not thought very definitely of their future ; they felt so confident in Jesus that they were content to let Him bring in His kingdom as He pleased ; they were so charmed with the novelty of their life as His disciples, with the great ideas that dropped from His lips, with the wonderful works He did, with the new light He shed upon all the personages and institutions of the world, that they were satisfied to leave their hope undefined. But all this satisfaction and secret VOL. II. 8 r f 114 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. assurance of hope depended on Christ. As yet He had not given to them anything which could enable them to make any mark upon the world. They were still very ignorant, so that any lawyer could entangle and puzzle them. They had not received from Christ any influential position in society from which they could sway men. There were no great visible institu- tions with which they could identify themselves and so become conspicuous. It was with dismay, therefore, that they heard that He was going where they could not accompany Him. A cloud of gloomy foreboding gathered on their faces as they lay round the table and fixed their eyes on Him as on one whose words they would interpret differently if they could. Their anxious looks are not disregarded. " Let not your heart be troubled," He says : " believe in God, and in Me, too, believe." Do not give way to disturbing thoughts ; do not suppose that only failure, disgrace, helplessness, and calamity await you. Trust God. In this, as in all matters. He is guiding and ruling and working His own good ends through all present evil. Trust Him, even when you cannot penetrate the darkness. It is His part to bring you successfully through ; it is your part to follow where He leads. Do not question and debate and vex your soul, but leave all to Him. " Why art thou cast V down, O my soul ? and why art thou disquieted within me ? Hope thou in God ; for I shall yet praise Him who is the health of my countenance and my God." "And in Me, too, trust." I would not leave you had I not a purpose to serve. It is not to secure My own safety or happiness I go. It is not to occupy the sole available room in My Father's house. There are many rooms there, and I go to prepare a place for you. xiii.31— xiv.4.] JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. 115 Trust Me. In order that they may fully understand the reasonableness of His departure He assures them, first of all, that it has a purpose. The parent mourns over the son who in mere waywardness leaves his home and his occupation ; but with very different feelings does he follow one who has come to see that the greater good of the family requires that he should go, and who has carefully ascertained where ancj how he can best serve those he leaves behind. To such an absence men can reconcile themselves. The parting is bitter, but the greater good to be gained by it enables them to approve its reasonableness and to submit. And what our Lord says to His disciples is virtually this : I have not wearied of earth and tired of your company, neither do I go because I must. I could escape Judas arid the Jews. But I have a purpose which requires that I should go. You have not found Me impulsive, neither am I now acting without good reason. Could I be of more use to you by staying", I would stay. This is a new kind of assertion to be made by human lips : " I am going into the other world to effect a a purpose." Often the sense of duty has been so strong in men that they have left this world without a murmur. But no one has felt so clear about what lies beyond, or has been so confident of his own power to effect any change for the better in the other world, that he has left this for a sphere of greater usefulness. This is what Christ does. But He also explains what His purpose is : " In My Father's house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you." The Father's house was a new figure for heaven. The idea of God's house was, however, familiar to the Jews. But in the Temple the freedom ii6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. and familiarity which we associate with home were absent. It was only when One came who felt that His real home was in God that the Temple could be called " the Father's house." Yet there is nothing that the heart of man more importunately craves than the freedom and ease which this name implies. To live unafraid of God, not shrinking from Him, but so truly at one with Him that we live as one household bright- ened by His presence — this is the thirst for God which is one day felt in every heart. And on His part God has many mansions in His house, proclaiming that He desires to have us at home with Him ; that He wishes us to know and trust Him, not to change our counte- nances when we meet Him at a corner, save by an added brightness of joy. And this is what we have to look forward to — that after all our coldness and dis- trust have been removed and our hearts thawed by His presence, we shall live in the constant enjoyment of a Father's love, feehng ourselves more truly at home with Him than with any one else, delighting in the perfectness of His sympathy and the abundance of His provision. Into this intimacy with God, this freedom of the universe, this sense that " all things are ours " because we are His, this entirely attractive heaven, we are to be introduced by Christ. " I go to prepare a place for you." It is He who has transformed the darkness of the grave into the bright gateway of the Father's home, where all His children are to find eternal rest and ever- lasting joy. As an old writer says, " Christ is the quartermaster who provides quarters for all who follow Him." He has gone on before to make ready for those whom He has summoned to come after Him. If we ask why it was needful that Christ should xiii.31— xiv.4.] JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. 117 go forward thus, and what precisely He had to do in the way of preparation, the question may be answered in different ways. These disciples in after-years com- pared Christ's passing into the Father's presence to the high priest's entrance within the veil to present the blood of sprinkling and to make intercession. But in the language of Christ there is no hint that such thoughts were in His mind. It is the Father's house that is in His mind, the eternal home of men ; and He sees the Father welcoming Him as the leader of many brethren, and with gladness in His heart going from room to room, always adding some new touch for the comfort and surprise of the eagerly expected children. If God, like a grieved and indignant father whose sons have preferred other company to his, had dismantled and locked the rooms that once were ours, Christ has made our peace, and has given to the yearning heart of the Father opportunity to open these rooms once more and deck them for our home-coming. With the words of Christ there enters the spirit a conviction that when we pass out of this life we shall find our- selves as much fuller of life and deeper in joy as we are nearer to God, the source of all life and joy ; and that when we come to the gates of God's dwelling it will not be as the vagabond and beggar unknown to the household and who can give no good account of himself, but as the child whose room is ready for him, whose coming is expected and prepared for, and who has indeed been sent for. This of itself is enough to give us hopeful thoughts of the future state. Christ is busied in preparing for us what will give us satisfaction and joy. When we expect a guest we love and have written for, we take pleasure in preparing for his reception, — we hang in Ii8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. his room the picture he Hkes ; if he is infirm, we wheel in the easiest chair ; we gather the flowers he admires and set them on his table ; we go back and back to see if nothing else will suggest itself to us, so that when he comes he may have entire satisfaction. This is enough for us to know — that Christ is similarly occu- pied. He knows our tastes, our capabihties, our attain- ments, and he has identified a place as ours and holds it for us. What the joys and the activities and occu- pations of the future shall be we do not know. With the body we shall lay aside many of our appetites and tastes and proclivities, and what has here seemed necessary to our comfort will at once become indif- ferent. We shall not be able to desire the pleasures that now allure and draw us. The need of shelter, of retirement, of food, of comfort, will disappear with the body ; and what the joys and the requirements of a spiritual body will be we do not know. But we do know that at home with God the fullest life that man can live will certainly be ours. It is a touching evidence of Christ's truthfulness and fidelity to His people that is given in the words, " If /It were not so, I would have told you " — that is to say, if it had not been possible for you to follow Me into the Father's presence and find a favourable reception there, I would have told you this long ago. I would not have taught you to love Me, only to have given you the grief of separation. I would not have encouraged you to hope for what I was not sure you are to receive. He had all along seen how the minds of the disciples were working ; He had seen that by being admitted to familiarity with Him they had learnt to expect God's eternal favour ; and had this been a deceitful expecta- tion He would have undeceived them. So it is with xiii.3i— xiv.4.] JESUS ANNOUNCES HIS DEPARTURE. ilQ Him still. The hopes His word begets are not vain. These dreams of glory that pass before the spirit that listens to Christ and thinks of Him are to be realised. If it were not so, He would have told us. We our- selves feel that we are scarcely acting an honest part when we allow persons to entertain false hopes, even when these hopes help to comfort and support them, as in the case of persons suffering from disease. So our Lord does not beget hopes He cannot satisfy. If there were still difficulties in the way of our eternal happiness, He would have told us of these. If there were any reason to despair, He Himself would have been the first to tell us to despair. If eternity were to be a blank to us, if God were inaccessible, if the idea of a perfect state awaiting us were mere talk. He would have told us s'o. Neither will the Lord leave His disciples to find their own way to the Father's home : " If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also." Present separation was but the first step towards abiding union. And as each disciple was summoned to follow Christ in death, he recognised that this was the summons, not of an earthly power, but of his Lord ; he recognised that to him the Lord's promise was being kept, and that he was being taken into eternal union with Jesus Christ. From many all the pain and darkness of death have been taken away by this assurance. They have accepted death as the needful transition from a state in which much hinders fellowship with Christ to a state in which that fellowship is all in all. IX. THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. "Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest ; how know we the way ? Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life : no one comcth unto the Father, but by Me. If ye had known Me, ye would have known My Father also : from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him." — John xiv. 5-7. 122 IX. THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. IT surprises us to find that words which have become famihar and most intelligible to us should have been to the Apostles obscure and puzzling. Apparently they were not yet persuaded that their Master was shortly to die ; and, accordingly, when He spoke of going to His Father's house, it did not occur to them that He meant passing into the spiritual world. His assuring words, "Where I am, there ye shall be also," therefore fell short. And when He sees their bewilder- ment written on their faces. He tentatively, half interro-- gatively, adds, " And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know." ^ Unless they knew where He was going, there was less consolation even in the promise that He would come for them after He had gone and prepared a place for them. And when He thus chal- lenges them candidly to say whether they understood where He was going, and where He would one day take them also, Thomas, always the mouthpiece for the despondency of the Twelve, at once replies, " Lord, we know not whither Thou goest ; and how can we know the way ? " This interruption by Thomas gives occasion to the ' Or, " And whither I go ye know the way." 123 124 TtiE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. great declaration, " I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life : no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me." It is, then, to the Father that Christ is the Way. And He is the Way by being the Truth and the Life. We must first, then, consider in what sense He is the Truth and the Life. L I am the Truth. Were these words merely equivalent to " I speak the truth," it would be much to know this of One who tells us things of so measureless a consequence to ourselves. The faith of the disciples was being strained by what He had just been saying to them. Here was a man in most respects like them- selves : a man who got hungry and sleepy, a man who was to be arrested and executed by the rulers, assuring them that He was going to prepare for them everlasting habitations, and that He would return to take them to these habitations. He saw that they found it hard to believe this. Who does not find it hard to believe all our Lord tells us of our future ? Think how much we trust simply to His word. If He is not true, then the whole of Christendom has framed its life on a false issue, and is met at death by blank disappointment. Christ has aroused in our minds by His promises and statements a group of ideas and expectations which nothing but His word could have persuaded us to entertain. Nothing is more remarkable about our Lord than the calmness and assurance with which He utters the most astounding statements. The ablest and most enlightened men have their hesitations, their periods of agonising doubt, their suspense of judgment, their laboured inquiries, their mental conflicts. With Jesus there is nothing of this. From first to last He sees with perfect clearness to the utmost bound of human thought, knows with absolute certainty what- xiv.s-7.] THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. 125 ever is essential for us to know. His is not the assurance of ignorance, nor is it the dogmatism of traditional teaching, nor the evasive assurance of a superficial and reckless mind. It is plainly the assur- ance of One who stands in the full noon of truth and speaks what He knows. But in His endeavours to gain the confidence of men there is discernible no anger at their incredulity. Again and again He brings forward reasons why His word should be believed. He appeals to their knowledge of His candour : " If it were not so, I would have told you." It was the ti-uth He came into the world to bear witness to. Lies enough were current already. He came to be the Light of the world, to dispel the darkness and bring men into the very truth of things. But with all His impressiveness of asseveration there is no anger, scarcely even wonder that men did not believe, because He saw as plainly as we see that to venture our eternal hope on His word is not easy. And yet He answered promptly and with authority the questions which have employed the lifetime of many and baffled them in the end. He answered them -as if they were the very alphabet of knowledge. These alarmed and perturbed disciples ask Him : " Is there a life beyond ? is there another side of death ? " " Yes," He says, " through death I go to the Father." " Is there," they ask, " for us also a life beyond ? shall such creatures as we find sufficient and suitable habitation and welcome when we pass from this warm, well-known world ? " " In My Father's house," He says, " are many mansions." Confronted with .the problems that most deeply exercise the human spirit, He without faltering pronounces upon them. For every question which our most anxious and trying experiences dictate 1 126 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. He has the ready and sufficient answer. " He is the Truth." But more than this is contained in His words. He says not merely " I speak the truth," but " I am the Truth." In His person and work we find all truth that it is essential to know. He is the true Man, the reve- lation of perfect manhood, in whom we see what human life truly is. In His own history He shows us our own capacities and our own destiny. An angel or an inanimate law might iell us the truth about human life, but Christ is the Truth. He is man like ourselves. If we are extinguished at death, so is He. If for us there is no future life, neither is there for Him. He is Himself human. Further and especially, He is the truth about God : " If ye had known Me, ye had known My Father also." Strenuous efforts are being made in our day to convince us that all .our search after God is vain, because by the very nature of the case it is impossible to know God, We are assured that all our imaginations of God are but a reflection of ourselves magnified infinitely ; and that what results from all our thinking is not God, but only a magnified man. We form in our thoughts an ideal of human excellence — perfect holiness and perfect love ; and we add to this highest moral character we can conceive a supernatural power and wisdom,- and this we call God. But this, we are assured, is but to mis- lead ourselves ; for what we thus set before our minds as Divine is not God, but only a higher kind of man. But God is not a higher kind of man : He is a different kind of being — a Being to whom it is absurd to ascribe intelligence, or will, or personaHty, or anything human. We have felt the force of what is thus urged ; and xiv. 5-7] THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. 127 feeling most deeply that for us the greatest of all questions is, What is God ? we have been afraid lest, after all, we have been deluding ourselves with an image of our own creating very different from the reality. We have felt that there is a great truth lying at the heart of what is thus urged, a truth which the Bible makes as much of as philosophy does — the truth that we cannot find out God, cannot comprehend Him. We say certain things about Him, as that He is a Spirit ; but which of us knows what a pure spirit is, which of us can conceive in our minds a distinct idea of what we so freely speak of as a spirit ? Indeed, it is because it is impossible for us to have any sufficient idea of God as He is in Himself that He has become man and manifested Himself in flesh. This revelation of God in man implies that there is an affinity and likeness between God and man — that man is made in God's image. Were it not so, we should see in Christ, not God at all, but only man. If God is manifest in Christ, it is because there is that in God which can find suitable expression in a human life and person. In fact, this revelation takes for granted that in a sense it is quite true that God is a magnified Man — that He is a Being in whom there is much that resembles what is in man. And it stands to reason that this must be so. It is quite true that man can only conceive what is like himself; but that is only half the truth. It is also true that God can only ereate what is consistent with His own mind. In His crea- tures we see a reflection of Himself And as we ascend from the lowest of them to the highest, we see what He considers the highest qualities. Finding in ourselves these highest qualities — qualities which enable us to understand all lower creatures and to use them — X 128 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. we gather that in God Himself there must be something akin to our mind and to our inner man. ., r Christ, then, is " the Truth," because He is the Revealer of God. In Him we learn what God is and how to approach Him. But knowledge is not enough. It is conceivable that we should have learned much about God and yet have despaired of ever becoming like Him. It might gradually have become our con- viction that we were for ever shut out from all good, although that is incompatible with a true knowledge of God ; for if God is known at all. He must be known as Love, as self-communicating. But the possibility of having knowledge which we cannot use is precluded by the fact that He who is the Truth is also the Life. In Him who is the Revealer we at the same time find power to avail ourselves of the revelation. For : II. " I am the Life." The declaration .need not be restricted to the immediate occasion. Christ imparts to men power to use the knowledge of the Father He gives them. He gives men desire, will, and power to live with God and in God. But is not all life implied in this ? This is life as men are destined to know it. In every man there is a thirst for life. Everything that clogs, impedes, or retards life we hate; 'sickness, I imprisonment, death, whatever diminishes, enfeebles, limits, or destroys life, we abhor. Happiness means abundant life, great vitality finding vent for itself in healthy ways. Great scope or opportunity of living to good purpose is useless to the invalid who has little life in himself; and, on the other hand, abundant vitality is only a pain to the man who is shut up and can spend his energy only in pacing a cell eight feet by four. Our happiness depends upon these two conditions — perfect energy and infinite scope. xiv. 5-7] THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. 129 But can we assure ourselves of either ? Is not the one certainty of hfe, as we know it, that it must end ? Is it not certain that, no matter what energy the most vigorous of us enjoy, we shall all one day " He in cold obstruction " ? Naturally we fear that time, as if all life were then to end for us. We shrink from that apparent termination, as if beyond it there could be but a shadowy, spectral life in which nothing is substantial, nothing lively, nothing delightsome, nothing strong. That state which we shrink from our Lord chooses as a condition of perfect life, abundant and untrammelled. And what He has chosen for Himself He means to bestow upon us. Why should we find it so hard to believe in that abundant life ? There is a sufficient source of physical life which upholds the universe and is not burdened, which in continuance and exuberantly brings forth life in inconceivably various forms. The world around us indicates a source of life which seems always to grow and expand rather than to be exhausted. So there is a source of spiritual life, a force sufficient to uphold all men in righteousness and in eternal vitality of spirit, and which can give birth to ever new and varied forms of heroic, holy, godly living — a force which is ever pressing forward to find expression through all moral beings, and capable of making all human action as perfect, as beautiful, and infinitely more significant than the products of physical life which we see around us. If the flowers profusely scattered by the wayside are marvels of beauty, if the bodily frame of man and of the other animals is continually surprising us with some new revelation of exquisite arrangement of parts, if nature is so lavish and so perfect in physical Hfe, may we not believe that there is as rich a fountain of VOL. li. g 130 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. moral and spiritual life ? Nay, " the youths may faint and be weary, and the young men utterly fall," physical life may fail and in the nature of things must fail, " but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall run and not be weary." It is Jesus Christ who brings us into connection with this source of life eternal — He bears it in His own person. In Him we receive a new spirit; in Him our motive to live for rigliteoiisiiess is continually renewed ; we are conscious that in Him we touch what is undying and never fails to renew spiritual life in us. Whatever we need to give us true and everlasting life we have in Christ. Whatever we need to enable us to /come to the Father, whatever we shall need between I this present stage of experience and our final stage, we have in Him. The more, then, we use Christ, the more life we have. , The more we are with Him and the more we partake y y (of His Spirit, the fuller does our own life become. It is not by imitating successful men we become influential for good, but by living with Christ. It is not by adopt- ing the habits and methods of saints we become strong and useful, but by accepting Christ and His Spirit. Nothing can take the place of Christ. Nothing can take His words and say to us, " I am the Life." If we wish life, if we see that we are doing little good and desire energy to overtake the good that needs to be done, it is to Him we must go. If we feel as if all our efforts were vain, and as if we could not bear up any longer against our circumstances or against our wicked nature, we can receive fresh vigour and hopefulness only from Christ. We need not be surprised at our failures if we are not receiving from Christ the life that is in Him. And nothing can give us the life that is in Him but xiv. 5-7-] THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. 131 our own personal application to Him, our direct dealing with Himself. Ordinances and sacraments help to y bring Him clearly before us, but they are not living and cannot give us life. It is only in so far as through and in them we reach Christ and receive Him that we partake of that highest of all forms of life — the life that is in Him, the living One, by whom all things were made, and who in the very face of death can say, " Because I live ye shall live also." III. Being the Revealer of the Father, and giving men power to approach God and live in Him, Jesus legitimately designates Himself " the Way." Jesus never says "I am the Father"; He does not even say " I am God," for that might have produced mis- understanding. He uniformly speaks as if there were One on whom He Himself leant, and to whom He prayed, and with whom, as with another person, He had fellowship. " I am the Way," He says ; and a> way implies a goal beyond itself, some further object to which it leads and brings us. He is not the Being revealed, but the Revealer ; not the terminal object of our worship, but the image of the invisible God, the Priest, the Sacrifice. Christ announces Himself to Thomas as the Way, in order to remove from the mind of the disciple the uncertainty he felt about the future. He knew there were heights of glory and blessedness to which the Messiah would certainly attain, but which seemed dim and remote and even quite unattainable to sinful men. Jesus defines at once the goal and the way. All our vague yearnings after what will satisfy us He reduces to this simple expression : " the Father." This, He ' implies, is the goal and destiny of man ; to come to the Father, who embraces in His loving care all our wants, 132 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. our incapacities, our sorrows ; to reach and abide in a love that is strong, wise, educative, imperishable ; to reach this love and be so transformed by it as to feel more at home with this perfectly holy God than with any besides. And to bring us to this goal is the function of Christ, the Way. It is His to bring together what is highest and what is lowest. It is His to unite those who are separated by the most real obstacles : to bring us, weak and unstable and full of evil imaginings, into abiding union with the Supreme, glad to be conformed to Him and to accompHsh His purposes. In proclaiming Himself " the Way," Christ pronounces Himself able to effect the most real union between parties and conditions as separate as heaven and earth, sin and holiness, the poor creature I know myself to be and the infinite and eternal God who is so high I cannot know Him. Further, the way to which we commit ourselves when we seek to come to the Father through Christ is a Person. "I am the Way." It is not a cold, dead road we have to make the most of for ourselves, pursuing it often in darkness, in weakness, in fear. It is a living way — a way that renews our strength as we walk in it, that enlivens instead of exhausting us, that gives direction and light as we go forward. Often we seem to find our way barred ; we do not know how to get farther forward ; we wonder if there is no book in which we can find direction ; we long for some wise guide who could show us how to proceed. At such times Christ would have us hear Him saying, " I am the Way. If you abide in Me, if you continue in My love, you are in the way and must be carried forward to all good." Often we seem to lose ourselves and cannot tell whether our faces and our steps are directed xiv. 5-7] THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. 133 aright or not ; we become doubtful whether we have been making any progress or have not rather been going back. Often we lose heart and begin to doubt whether it is possible for us men ever to reach any purer, higher hfe ; we are going, we say, we know not whither ; this Ufe is full of blunders and failures. Many of the best and most earnest and gifted men have owned their ignorance of the ^ gur pose of life and of its end. No voice comes to us out of the unseen world to give us assurance that there is life there. How can lonely, ignorant, irresolute, weak, and helpless creatures such as we are ever attain to anything we can call blessedness ? To all such gloom and doubting Christ/ with the utmost confidence, says, " I am the Way. Wherever you are, at whatever point of expe- rience, at whatever stage of sin, this way begins where you are, and you have but to take it and it leads to God, to that unknown Highest you yearn for even while you shrink from Him. From your person, as you are at this moment, there leads a way to the Father." X X. THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 135 "Philip saith unto Him Lord, show us the Father, and it suRiceth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so longtime vviih you, and dost thou not know Me, Philip? he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father ; how sayest thou. Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me ? the words that I say unto you I speak not from Myself : but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me : or else believe Me for the very works' sake. Verily, verily, I say unto you. He that believeth on Me, the works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these shall he do ; because I go unto the Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask Me anything in My name, that will I do. If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth : whom the world cannot receive ; ,for it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him : ye know Him ; for He abideth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you desolate : I come unto you. Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth Me no more ; but ye behold Me : because I live, ye shall live also. In that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you. He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that lovetli me : and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him." — John xiv. S-2I. 136 X. THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. A THIRD interruption on the part of one of the disciples gives the Lord occasion to be still more explicit. Philip is only further bewildered by the words, " from henceforth ye know the Father and have seen Him." He catches, however, at the idea that the Father can be seen, and eagerly exclaims, " Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." In this exclama- tion there may be a little of that vexed and almost irritated feeling that every one at times has felt in reading the words of Christ. We feel as if He might have made things plainer. We unconsciously reproach Him with making a mystery, with going about and about a subject and refusing to speak straight at it. Philip felt that if Christ could show the Father, then there was no. need of any more enigmatical talk. Ignorant as this request may be, it sprang from the thirst for God which was felt by an earnest and godly man. It arose from the craving that now and again visits every soul to get to the heart of all mystery. Here in this life we are much in the dark. We feel ourselves to be capable of better enjoyments, of a higher life. The whole creation groaneth and travaileth, as if striving towards some better and more satisfying state. There is a something not yet 137 138 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. attained which we feel we must reach. Were this life all, we should pronounce existence a failure. And yet there is great uncertainty over our future. There is no familiar intercourse with those who have passed on and are now in the other world. We have no oppor- tunity of informing ourselves of their state and occupa- tions. We go on in great darkness and often with a feeling of great insecurity and trepidation ; feeling lost, in darkness, not knowing whither we are going, not sure that we are in the way to life and happiness. Why, we are tempted to ask, should there be so much uncertainty ? Why should we live so remote from the centre of things, and have to grope our way to life and light, clouded by doubts, beset by misleading and dis- turbing influences ? " Show us the Father," we are tempted to say with Philip — show us the Father and it sufficeth us. Show us the Supreme. Show us the eternal One who governs all. Take us but once to the centre of things and show us the Father in whom we live. Take us for once behind the scenes and let us see the hand that moves all things ; let us know all that can be known, that we may see what it is we are going to, and what is to become of us when this visible world is done.. Give us assurance that behind all this dumb, immovable mask of outward things there is a Hving God whose love we can trust and whose power can preserve us to life everlasting. To Philip's eager request Jesus replies : " Have I been so long time with you, and hast thou not known Me, Philip ? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father ; how sayest thou. Show us the Father ? " And it is thus our Lord addresses all whose unsatisfied craving finds voice in Philip's request. To all who crave some more immediate, if not more sensible xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 139 manifestation of God, to all who live in doubt and feel as if more might be done to give us certitude regarding the relation we hold to God and to the future, Christ says : No further revelation is to be made, because no further revelation is needed or can be made. All has been shown that can be shown. There is no more of the Father you can see than you have seen in Me. God has taken that form which is most comprehensible to you — your own form, the form of man. You have seen the Father. I am the truth, the reality. It is no longer a symbol telling you something about a distant God, but the Father Himself is in Me, speaking and acting among you through Me. What do we find in Christ ? We find perfection of moral character, superiority to circumstances, to the elements, to disease, to death. We find in Him One who forgives sin and brings peace of conscience, who bestows the Holy Spirit and leads to perfect righteous- ness. We cannot imagine anything in God which is not made present to us in Christ. In any part of the universe we should feel secure with Christ. In the most critical spiritual emergency we should have confidence that He could right matters. In the physical and in the spiritual world He is equally at home and equally commanding. We can believe Him when He says that he that has seen Him has seen the Father, What precisely does this utterance mean ? Does it only mean that Jesus in His holy and loving ways and in the whole of His character was God's very image ? As you might say of a son who strongly resembles his father, " If you have seen the one, you have seen the other," It is true that the self-sacrifice 140 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. and humility and devotedness of Jesus did give men new views of the true character of God, that His conduct was an exact transcript of God's mind and conveyed to men new thoughts of God. But it is plain that the connection between Jesus and God was a different kind of connection from that which subsists between every man and God. Every man might in a sense say, " I am in the Father and the Father in me." But plainly the very fact that Jesus said to Philip, " Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me ? " is proof that it was not this ordinary connection He had in view. Philip could have had no difficulty in perceiving and acknowledging that God was in Jesus as He is in every man. But if that were all that Jesus meant, then it was wholly out of place to appeal to the works the Father had given Him to do in proof of this assertion. When, therefore, Jesus said, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," He did not merely mean that by His superior holiness He had revealed the Father as no other man had done (although even this would be a most surprising assertion for any mere man to make — that He was so holy that whoever had seen Him had seen the absolutely holy God), but He meant that God was present with Him in a special manner. So important was it that the disciples should firmly grasp the truth that the Father was in Christ that Jesus proceeds to enlarge upon the proof or evidence of this. In the course of doing so He imparts to them three assurances fitted to comfort them in the prospect of His departure : first, that so far from being weakened by His going to the Father, they will do greater works than even those which had proved that the Father was xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. I4t present with Him ; second, that He would not leave them friendless and without support, but would send them the Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, who should abide with them ; and third, that although the world would not see Him, they would, and would recognise that He was the maintainer of their own life. But all this experience would serve to convince them that the Father was in Him. He had. He says, lived among them as the representative of the Father, uttering His will, doing His works. These works might have convinced them even if they were not spiritual enough to perceive that His words were Divine utterances. But a time was coming when a satisfying conviction of the truth that God had been present with them in the presence of Jesus would be wrought in them. When, after His departure, they found themselves doing the works of God, greater works than Jesus had done, when they found that the Spirit of truth dwelt in them, imparting to them the very mind and life of Christ Himself, then they should be certified of the truth that Jesus now declared, that the Father was in Him and He in the Father. " At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you." What their understanding could not at present quite grasp, the course of events and their own spiritual experience would make plain to them. When in the prosecution of Christ's instruc- tions they strove to fulfil His commands and carry out His will upon earth, they would find themselves coun- tenanced and supported by powers unseen, would find their life sustained by the life of Christ. Jesus, then, speaks here of three grades of con- viction regarding His claim to be God's representative : three kinds of evidence — a lower, a higher, and the 142 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. highest. There is the evidence of His miracles, the evidence of His words or His own testimony, and the evidence of the new spiritual life He would main- tain in His followers. Miracles are not the highest evidence, but they are evidence. One miracle might not be convincing evi- dence. Many miracles of the same kind, such as a number of cures of nervous complaints, or several suc- cessful treatments of blind persons, might only indicate superior knowledge of morbid conditions and of remedies. A physician in advance of his age might accomplish wonders. Or had all the miracles of Jesus been such as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, it might, with a shade of plausibility, have been urged that this was legerdemain. But what we see in Jesus is not power to perform an occasional wonder to make men stare or to win for Himself applause, but power as God's representative on earth to do whatever is needful for the manifestation of God's presence and for the fulfilment of God's will. It may surely at this time of day be taken for granted that Jesus was serious and true. The works are given Him by the Father to do : it is as an exhibition of God's power He performs them. They are therefore performed not in one form only, but in every needed form. He shows command over all riature, and gives evidence that spirit is -superior to matter and rules it. The miracles of Christ are also convincing because they are performed by a miraculous Person. That an ordinary man should seem to rule nature, or should exhibit wonders on no adequate occasion, must always seem unlikely, if not incredible. But that a Person notoriously exceptional, being what no other man has ever been, should do things that no other man has xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 143 done, excites no incredulity. That Christ was supremely and absolutely holy no one doubts ; but this itself is a miracle ; and that this miraculous Person should act miraculously is not unlikely. Moreover, there was adequate occasion both for the miracle of Christ's person and the miracle of His life and separate acts. There was an end to be served so great as to justify this interruption of the course of things as managed by men. If miracles are possible, then they could never be more worthily introduced. If at any time it might seem appropriate and needful that the unseen, holy, and loving God should assert His power over all that touches us His children, so as to give us the conscious- ness of His presence and of His faithfulness, surely that time was precisely then when Christ came forth from the Father to reveal His holiness and His love, to show men that supreme power and supreme holiness and love reside together in God. At present men are swinging from an excessive exaltation of miracles to an excessive depreciation of them. They sometimes speak as if no one could work a miracle, and sometimes as if any one could work a miracle. Having discovered that miracles do not convince every one, they leap to the conclusion that they convince no one ; and perceiving that Christ does not place them on the highest platform of evidence, they proceed to put them out of court altogether. This is inconsiderate and unwise. The miracles of Christ are appealed to by Himself as evidence of His truth ; and looking at them in connection with His person. His life, and His mission or object, considering their character as works of compassion, and their instruc- tive revelation of the nature and purpose of Him who did them, we cannot, I think, but feel that they carry 144 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. in them a very strong claim upon our most serious attention and do help us to trust in Christ. But Christ Himself, in the words before us, expects that those who have listened to His teaching and seen His life should need no other evidence that God is in Him and He in God — should not require to go down and back to the preliminary evidence of miracles which may serve to attract strangers. And, obviously, we get closer to the very heart of any person, nearer to the very core of their being, through their ordinary and habitual demeanour and conversation than by con- sidering their exceptional and occasional acts. And it is a great tribute to the power and beauty of Christ's personality that it actually is not His miracles which solely or chiefly convince us of His claims upon our confidence, but rather His own character as it shines through His talks with His disciples and yvith all men He met. This, we feel, is the Person for us. Here we have t'he human ideal. The characteristics here disclosed are those which ought everywhere to prevail. But the crowning evidence of Christ's unity with the Father can be enjoyed only by those who share His life. The conclusive evidence which for ever scatters doubt and remains abidingly as the immovable ground of confidence in Christ is our individual accept- ance of His Spirit. Christ's life in God, His identifi- cation with the ultimate source of life and power, is to become one of the unquestioned facts of consciousness, one of the immovable data of human existence. We shall one day be as sure of His unity with the Father, and that in Christ our life is hid in God, as we are sure that now we are alive. Faith in Christ is to become an unquestioned certainty. How then is this assurance to be attained ? It is to be attained when xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. I4S we ourselves as Christ's agents do greater works than He Himself did, and when by the power of His spiritual presence with us we live as He lived. Christ calls our attention to this with His usual formula when about to declare a surprising but im- portant truth : " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me shall do greater works than these." Beginning with such evidence and such trust as we can attain, we shall be encouraged by finding the practical strength which comes of union with Christ. It speedily became apparent to the disciples that our Lord meant what He said when He assured them that they would do greater works than He had done. His miracles had amazed them and had done much good. And yet, after all, they were necessarily very limited in number, in the area of their exercise, and in the permanence of their results. Many were healed ; but many, many more remained diseased. And even those who were healed were not rendered permanently un- assailable by disease. The eyes of the blind which were opened for a year or two must close shortly in death. , The paralysed, though sent from Christ's presence healed, must yield to the debilitating influ- ences of age and betake themselves again to the crutch or the couch. Lazarus given back for a time to his sorrowing sisters must again, and this time without recall, own the power of death. And how far did the influence of Christ penetrate into these healed persons ? Did they all obey His words and sin no more ? or did some worse thing than the disease He freed them from fall upon some of them ? Was there none who used his restored eyesight to minister to sin, his restored energies to do more wickedness than otherwise would have been possible ? In one word, the miracles of VOL. II. 10 146 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. Christ, great as they were and beneficent as they were, were still confined to the body, and did not directly touch the spirit of man. But was this the object of Christ's coming ? Did He come to do a little less than several of the great medical discoverers have done ? Assuredly not. These works of healing which He wrought on the bodies of men were, as John regularly calls them, "signs" ; they were not acts terminating in themselves, and finding their full significance in the happiness com- municated to the healed persons ; they were signs pointing to a power over men's spirits, and suggesting to men analogous but everlasting benefits. Christ wrought His miracles that men, beginning with what they could see and appreciate, might be led on to believe in and trust Him for power to help them in all their matters. And now He expressly announces to His disciples that these works which He had been doing were not miracles of the highest kind ; that miracles of the highest kind were works of healing and renewal wrought not on the bodies biit on the souls of men, works whose effects would not be deleted by disease and death, but would be permanent, works which should not be confined to Palestine, but should be coextensive with the human race. And these greater works He would now proceed to accomplish through His disciples. By His removal from earth His work was not to be stopped, but to pass into a higher stage. He had come to earth not to make a passing display of Divine power, not to give a tanta- lising glimpse of what the world might be were His power acting freely and continuously in it ; but He had come to lead us to apprehend the value of spiritual health and to trust Him for that. And now that He xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 147 had won men's trust and taught a few to love Him and to value His Spirit, He removes Himself from their sight, and puts Himself beyond the reach of those who merely sought for earthly benefits, that He may through the Spirit come to all who understood how much greater are spiritual benefits. This crowning evidence of Christ's being with the Father and in Him the disciples very soon enjoyed. On the day of Pentecost they f—'*^H such results follow- ing from their simple word as „ad never followed the word of Christ. Thousands were renewed in heart and life. And from that day to this these greater works have never ceased. And why ? " Because I go to the Father." And two reasons are given in these simple words. In the first place, no such results could be accoinplished by Christ because not till He died was the Father's love fully known. It was the death and resurrection of Christ that convinced men of the truth of what Christ had proclaimed in His life and in His words regarding the Father, The tender compunction which was stirred by His death gave a purchase to the preacher of repentance which did not previously exist. It is Christ's death and resurrection which have been the converting influence through all the ages, and these Christ Himself could not preach. It was only when He had gone to the Father that the greater works of His kingdom could be done. Besides, it was only then that the greater works could be under- stood and longed for. The fact is, that the death and resurrection of Christ radically altered men's concep- tions of the spiritual world, and gave, them a belief in a future life of the spirit such as they previously had not and could not have. When men came experimentally into contact with One who had passed through death, THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. and who now entered the unseen world full of plans and of vitality to execute them, a new sense of the value of spiritual benefits was born within them. The fact of being associated with a living Christ at God's right hand has refined the spiritual conceptions of men, and has given a quality to holiness which was not previously conspicuous. The spiritual world is now real and near, and men no longer think of Christ as a worker of miracles on physical nature, but as the King of the world unseen and the willing Source of all spiritual good. We sometimes wonder Christ preached so little and spoke so little as men do now in directing sinners to Him ; but He knew that while He lived this was almost useless, and that events would proclaim Him more effectually than any words. But when Christ gives as a reason for the greater works of His disciples that He Himself went to the Father, He also means that, being with the Father, He would be in the place of power, able to respond to the prayers of His people. "I go unto the Father, and whatsoever ye shall ask in My name that will I do." No man in Christ's circumstances would utter such words at random. They are uttered with a perfect knowledge of the difficulties and in absolute good faith. But praying " in Christ's name " is hot so easy an achievement as we are apt to think. Praying in Christ's name means, no doubt, that we go to God, not in our own name, but in His. He has given us power to use His name, as when we send a messenger we bid him use our name. Sometimes when we send a person to a friend we are almost afraid to give him our name, knowing that our friend will be anxious for our sakes to do all he can and perhaps too much for the applicant. And in going to God in the name of Christ, as those xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 149 who can plead His friendship and are identified with Him, we know we are sure of a loving and liberal reception. But praying in Christ's name means more than this. It means that we pray for such things as will promote Christ's kingdom. When we do anything in another's name, it is for him we do it. When we take possession of a property or a legacy in the name of some society, it is not for our own private advantage but for the society we take possession. When an officer arrests any one in the Queen's name, it is not to satisfy his private malice he does so ; and when he collects money in the name of government, it is not to fill his own pocket. Yet how constantly do we overlook this obvious con- dition of acceptable prayer ! To pray in Christ's name is to seek what He seeks, to ask aid in promoting what He has at heart. To come in Christ's name and plead selfish and worldly desires is absurd. To pray in Christ's name is to pray in the spirit in which He Himself prayed and for objects He desires. When we measure our prayers by this rule, we cease to wonder that so few seem to be answered. Is God to answer prayers that positively lead men away from Him ? Is He to build them up in the presumption that happiness can be found in the pursuit of selfish objects and worldly comfort ? It is when a man stands, as these disciples stood, detached from worldly hopes and finding all in Christ, so clearly apprehending the sweep and benignity of Christ's will as to see that it comprehends all good to man, and that life can serve no purpose if it do not help to fulfil that will — it is- then a man prays with assurance and finds his prayer answered. Christ had won the love of these men and knew that their chief desire would be to serve Him, that their I50 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. prayers would always be that they might fulfil His purposes. Their fear was, not that He would summon them to live wholly for the ends for which He had lived, but that when He was gone they should find themselves unfit to contend with the world. And therefore He gives them the final encourage- ment that He would still be with them, not indeed in a visible form apparent to all eyes, but in a valid and powerful spiritual manner appreciable by those who loved Christ and strove to do His will. " If ye love Me, keep My commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Com- forter," another Advocate, one called to your aid, and who shall so effectually aid you that in His presence and help you will know Me present with you. " I will not leave you comfortless, like orphans : / will come to you." Christ Himself was still to be with them. He was nqt merely to leave them His memory and example, but was to be with them, sustaining and guid- ing and helping them even as He had done. The only difference was to be this — that whereas up to this time they had verified His presence by their senses, seeing His body, hearing His words, and so forth, they should henceforward verify His presence by a spiritual sense which the world of those who did not love Him could not make use of. " Yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more ; but ye see Me : because I live, ye shall live also." They would find that their life was bound up in His ; and as that new life of theirs grew strong and proved itself victorious over the world and powerful to subdue men's hearts to Christ and win the world to Christ's kingdom, they should feel' a growing persuasion, a deepening consciousness, that, this life of theirs was but the manifestation of the continued life xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 151 of Christ. " At that day they would know that Christ was in the Father, and they in Him, and He in them." Consciousness, then, of Christ's present hfe and of His close relation to ourselves is to be won only by loving Him and living in Him and for Him. Lower grades of faith there are on which most of us stand, and by which, let us hope, we are slowly ascending to this assured and ineradicable consciousness. Drawn to Christ we are by the beauty of His life, by His evident mastery of all that concerns us, by His know- ledge, by the revelation He makes ; but doubts assail us, questionings arise, and we long for the full assurance of the personal love of God and of the con- tinued personal life and energy of Christ which would give us an immovable ground to stand on. According to Christ's explanation given in this passage to His disciples, this deepest conviction, this unquestionable consciousness of His presence, is attained only by those who proceed upon the lower grades of faith, and with true love for Him seek to find their life in Him. It is a conviction which can only be won experimentally. The disciples passed from the lower to the higher faith at a bound. The sight of the risen Lord, the new world vividly present to them in His person, gave their devotedness an impulse which carried them at once and for ever to certainty. There are many still who are so drawn by spiritual affinity to Christ that unhesitatingly and unrepentingly they give themselves wholly to Him, and have the reward of a conscious life in Christ. Others have more slowly to win their way upwards, fighting against unbelief, striving to give themselves more undividedly to Christ, and encouraging themselves with the hope that from their hearts also all doubts will one day for ever 152 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. vanish. Certain it is that Christ's life can only be given to those who are willing to receive it — certain it is that only those who seek to do His work seek to be sustained by His life. If we are not striving to attain those ends which He gave His life to accom- plish, we cannot be surprised if we are not sensible of receiving His aid. If we aim at worldly ends, we shall need no other energy than what the world supplies ; but if we throw ourselves heartily into the Christian order of things and manner of life, we shall at once be sensible of our need of help, and shall know whether we receive it or not. Christ's promise is explicit — a promise given as the stay of His friends in their bitterest need : " He that hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me : and he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love Him, and will manifest Myself to him." It will still be a spiritual manifesta- tion which can be perceived only by those whose spirits are exercised to discern such things ; but it will be absolutely satisfying. We shall find one day that Christ's work has been successful, that He has brought men and God into a perfect harmony. " That day" shall arrive for us also, when we shall find that Christ has actually accomplished what He undertook, and has set our life and ourselves on an enduring foundation — has given us eternal life in God, a life of perfect joy. Things are under God's guidance pro- gressive, and Christ is the great means He uses for the progress of all that concerns ourselves. And what Christ has done is not to be fruitless or only half effective ; He will see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied — satisfied because in us the utmost of- happiness and the utmost of good have been xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 153 attained, because greater and richer things than man Kas conceived have been made ours. These utterances are fitted to dispel a form of un- belief which seriously hinders many sincere inquirers. It arises from the difficulty of believing in Christ as now alive and able to afford spiritual assistance. Many persons who enthusiastically admit the perfectness of Christ's character and of the morality He taught, and who desire above all else to make that morality their own, are yet unable to believe that He can give them any real and present assistance in their efforts after holiness. A teacher is a very different thing from a Saviour. They are satisfied with Christ's teaching ; but they need more than teaching — they need not only to see the road,^ but to be enabled to follow it. Unless a man can find some real connection between himself and God, unless he can rely upon receiving inward support from God, he feels that there is nothing which can truly be called salvation. This form of unbelief assails almost every man. Very often it results from the slow-growing conviction that the Christian religion is not working in ourselves the definite results we expected. When we read the New Testament, we see the reasonableness of faith, we cannot but subscribe to the theory of Christianity ; but when we endeavour to practise it we fail. We have tried it, and it does not seem to work. At first we think this is something peculiar to ourselves, and that through some personal carelessness or mistake we have failed to receive all the benefit which others receive. But as time goes on the suspicion strengthens in some minds that faith is a delusion : prayer seems to be unanswered ; effort seems to be unacknowledged. The power of an almighty spirit within the human 154 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. spirit cannot be traced. Perhaps this suspicion, more than all other causes put together, produces undecided, heartless Christians. What, then, is to be said in view of such doubts ? Perhaps it may help us past them if we consider that spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and that the one proof of His ascension to God's right hand which Christ Himself promised was the bestowal of His Spirit. If we find that, however slowly, we are coming into a truer harmony with God ; if we find that we can more cordially approve the Spirit of Christ, and give to that Spirit a more real place in our life ; if we are finding that we can be satisfied with very little in the way of selfish and worldly advancement, and that it is a greater satisfaction to us to do good than to get good ; if we find ourselves in any degree more patient, more temperate, more humble, — then Christ is manifesting in us His present life in the only way in which He promised to do so. Even if we have more knowledge, more perception of what moral greatness is, if we see through the superficial formalisms which once passed for religion with us, this is a step in the right direction, and if wisely used may be the founda- tion of a superstructure of intelligent service and real fellowship with God. Every discovery and abandon- ment of error, every unmasking of delusion, every attainment of truth, is a step nearer to permanent reality, and is a true spiritual gain ; and if in times past we have had little experience of spiritual joy and confidence, if our thoughts have been sceptical and questioning and perplexed, all this may be the needful preliminary to a more independent and assured and truer faith, and may be the very best proof that Christ is guiding our mind and attending to our prayers. It xiv.8-2i.] THE FATHER SEEN IN CHRIST. 155 is for " the world " to refuse to believe in the Spirit, because " it beholdeth Him not, neither knoweth Him." It may also be said that to think of Christ as a good man who has passed away like other good men, leaving an influence and no more behind Him, to think of Him as lying still in His tomb outside Jerusalem, is to reverse not only the belief of those who knew Christ best, but the belief of godly men in all ages. For in all ages both before and after Christ it has been the clear conviction of devout souls that God sought them much more ardently and persistently than they sought God. The truth which shines most con- spicuously in the experience of all the saved is that they were saved by God and not by themselves. If human experience is to be trusted at all, if it in any case reflects the substantial verities of the spiritual world, then we may hold it as proved in the uniform experience of men that God somehow communicated to them a living energy, and not only taught them what to do, but gave them strength to do it. If under the Christian dispensation we are left to make the best we can for ourselves of the truth taught by Christ and of the example He set us in His life and death, then the Christian dispensation, so far from being an advance on all that went before, fails to supply us with that very thing which is sought through all religions — actual access to a living source of spiritual strength. I believe that the resurrection of Christ is established by stronger evidence than exists for any other his- torical fact ; but apart altogether from the historical evidence, the entire experience of God's people goes to show that Christ, as the mediator between God and man, as the representative of God and the channel of 156 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. His influence upon us, must be now alive, and must be in a position to exert a personal care and a personal influence, and to yield a present and inward assistance. Were it otherwise, we should be left without a Saviour to struggle against the enemies of the soul in our own strength, and this would be a complete reversal of the experience of all those who in past ages have been engaged in the same strife and have been victorious. xr. The bequest of peace. 157 "Judas (not Iscaiiot) saith unto Him, Lord, what is come to pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us, and not unto the world? Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love Me, he will keep My word : and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make our abode with him. He that loveth Me not keepeth not My words : and the word which ye hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me. These things have I spoken unto you, while yet abiding with you. But the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you. Peace I leave with you; My peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth, give lunto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful. Ye heard how I said to you, .1 go away, and I come unto you. If ye loved Me, ye would have rejoiced, because I go unto the Father : for the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you before it come to pass, that, when it is come to pass, ye may believe. I will no more speak much with you, for the prince of the world cometh : and he hath nothing in Me ; but that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do. Arise, let us go hence." — John xiv. 22-31. 158 XI. THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. THE encouraging assurances of our Lord are interrupted by Judas Thaddeus. As Peter, Thomas, and Philip had availed themselves of their Master's readiness to solve their difficulties, so now Judas utters his perplexity. He perceives that the manifestation of which Jesus has spoken is not public and general, but special and private ; and he says, "Lord, what has happened, that Thou art to manifest Thyself to us, and not to the world ? " It would seem as if Judas had been greatly impressed by the public demonstration in favour of Jesus a day or two pre- viously, and supposed that something must have occurred to cause I lim now to wish to manifest Himself only to a select few. Apparently Judas' construction of the future was still entangled with the ordinary Messianic expecta- tion. He thought Jesus, although departing for a little, would return speedily in outward Messianic glory, and would triumphantly enter Jerusalem and establish Himself there. But how this could be done privately he could not understand. And if Jesus had entirely altered His plan, and did not mean immediately to claim Messianic supremacy, but only to manifest Himself to a few, was this possible ? 159 i6o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. By His reply our Lord shows for the hundredth time that outward proclamation and external acknow- ledgment were not in His thoughts. It is to the individual and in response to individual love He will manifest Himself. It is therefore a spiritual manifes- tation He has in view. Moreover, it was not to a specially privileged few, whose number was already complete, that He would manifest Himself. Judas supposed that to him and his fellow-Apostles, " us," Jesus would manifest Himself, and over against this select company he set " the world." But this mechani- cal line of demarcation our Lord obliterates in His reply, " U any man loveth Me, . . . We will come to him." He enounces the great spiritual law that they who seek to have Christ's presence manifested to them must love and obey Him. He that longs for more satisfying knowledge of spiritual realities, he that thirsts for certainty and to see God as if face to face, must expect no sudden, or magical revelation, but must be content with the true spiritual education which proceeds by loving and living. To the disciples the method might seem slow — to us also it often seems slow ; but it is the method which nature requires. Our knowledge of God, our belief that in Christ we have a hold of ultimate truth and are living among eternal verities, grow with our love and service of Christ. It may take us a life- time — it will take us a lifetime — to learn to love Him as we ought, but others have learned and we also may learn, and there is no possible experience so precious to us. It is, then, to those who serve Him that Christ manifests Himself, and manifests Himself in an abiding, spiritual, influential manner. That those who do not' serve Him do not believe in His presence and power civ. 22-31.] THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. i6i is to be expected. But were those who have served Him asked if they had become more convinced of His spiritual and effectual presence, their voice would be that this promise had been fulfilled. And this is the very citadel of the religion of Christ. If Christ does not now abide with and energetically aid those who serve Him, then their faith is vain. If His spiritual presence with them is not manifested in spiritual results, if they have no evidence that He is personally and activ^ely employed in and with them, their faith is vain. To believe in a Christ long since removed from earth and whose present life cannot now influence or touch mankind is not the faith which Christ Himself invites. And if His promise to abide with those who love and serve Him is not actually performed, Christendom has been produced hy a mistake and has lived on a delusion. At this point (ver. 25) Jesus pauses ; and feeling how little He had time to say of what was needful, and how much better they would understand their relation to Him after He had finally passed from their bodily sight, He says : " These things I have spoken to you, while yet I remain with you ; but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, which the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and will remind you of all that I have said to you." Jesus cannot tell them all He would wish them to know ; but the same Helper whom He has already promised will especially help them by giving them understanding of what has already been told them, and by leading them into further know- ledge. He is to come "in the name " of Jesus — that is to say, as His representative — and to .carry on His work in the world. ^ ' "In this designation of the teaching Spirit as holy, there lie lessons for two classes of people. All fanatical professions of possessing Divine VOL. II. II i62 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. Here, then, the Lord predicts that one day His disciples will know more than He has taught them. They were to advance in knowledge beyond the point to which He had brought them. His teaching would necessarily be the foundation of all future attainment, and whatever would not square with that they must necessarily reject ; but they were to add much to the foundation He had laid. We cannot therefore expect to find in the teaching of Jesus all that His followers ought to know regarding Himself and His connection with them. All that is absolutely necessary we shall find there ; but if we wish to know all that He would have us know, we must look beyond. The teaching which we receive from the Apostles is the requisite and promised complement of the teaching which Christ Himself delivered. He being the subject taught as much as the teacher, and His whole experience as living, dying, rising, and ascending, constituting the facts which- Christian teaching was to explain, it was impossible that He Himself should be the final teacher. He could not at once be text and exposition. He lived among men, and by His teaching shed much light on the significance of His life ; He died, and was not altogether silent regarding the meaning of His death, but it was enough that He furnished matter for His Apostles to explain, and confined Himself to sketching the mere outline of Christian truth. Again and again throughout this last conversation illumination, which are not warranted and sealed by purity of life, are lies or self-delusion. And, on the other hand, cold-blooded intellec- tualism will never force the locks of the palace of Divine truth ; but they that come there must have clean hands and a pure heart; and only those who have the love and the longing for goodness will be wise scholars in Christ's school." — Maclaren. xiv.22-3i.J THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. 163 Jesus tries to break off, but finds it impossible. Here (ver. 27), when He has assured them that, although He Himself leaves them in ignorance of many things, the Spirit will lead them into all truth, He proceeds to make His parting bequest. He would fain leave them what will enable them to be free from care and distress ; but He has none of those worldly possessions which men usually lay up for their children and those de- pendent on them. House, lands, clothes, money, He had none. He could not even secure for those who were to carry on His work an exemption from persecu- tion which He Himself had not enjoyed. He did not leave them, as some initiators have done, stable though new institutions, an empire of recent origin but already firmly established, " Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." But He does give them that which all other bequests aim at producing : " Peace I leave with you." Men may differ as to the best means of attaining peace, or even as to the kind of peace that is desirable, but all agree in seeking an untroubled state. We seek a condition in which we shall have no unsatisfied desires gnawing at our heart and making peace impossible, no stings of conscience, dipped in the poison of past wrong-doing, torturing us hour by hour, no foreboding anxiety darkening and disturbing a present which might otherwise be peaceful. The comprehensive nature of this possession is shown by the fact that peace can be produced only by the contribution of past, present, and future. As health implies that all the laws which regulate bodily life are being observed, and as it is disturbed by the infringement of any one of these, so peace of mind implies that in the spiritual life all is as it should be. Introduce remorse or an 1 64 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. evil conscience, and you destroy peace; introduce fear or anxiety, and peace is impossible. Introduce any- thing discordant, ambition alongside of indolence, a sensitive conscience alongside of strong passions, and peace takes flight. He, therefore, who promises to give peace promises to give unassailable security, inward integrity and perfectness, all which goes to make up that perfect condition in which we shall be for ever content to abide. Jesus further defines the peace which He was leaving to the disciples as that peace which He had Himself enjoyed: ^^ My peace I give unto you," — as one hands over a possession he has himself tested, the shield or helmet that has served him in battle. " That which has protected Me in a thousand fights I make over to you." The peace which Christ desires His disciples to enjoy is that which characterised Himself; the same serenity in danger, the same equanimity in troublous circumstances, the same freedom from anxiety about results, the same speedy recovery of composure after anything which for a moment ruffled the calm surface of His demeanour. This is what He makes over to His people ; this is what He makes possible to all who serve Him. There is nothing which more markedly distinguishes Jesus and proves His superiority than His calm peace in all circumstances. He was poor, and might have resented the incapacitating straitness of poverty. He was driven from place to place. His purpose and motives were suspected. His action and teaching resisted, the good He strove to do continually marred ; but He carried Himself through all with serenity. It is said that nothing shakes the nerve of brave men so much as fear of assassination : our Lord lived among bitterly xiv. 22-31.] THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. 165 hostile men, and was again and again on the brink of being made away with, but He was imperturbably resolute to do the work given Him to do. Take Him at an unguarded moment, tell Him the boat is sinking underneath Him, and you find the same undisturbed composure. He Avas never troubled at the results of His work or about His own reputation ; when He was reviled, He reviled not again. This unruffled serenity was so obvious a characteristic of the demeanour of Jesus, that as it was familiar to His friends, so it was perplexing to His judges. The Roman governor saw in His bearing an equanimity so different from the callousness of the hardened criminal and from the agitation of the self-condemned, that he could not help exclaiming in astonishment, " Dost Thou not know that I have power over Thee ? " Therefore without egotism our Lord could speak of " My peace." The world had come to Him in various shapes, and He had conquered it. No allurement of pleasure, no opening to ambition had distracted Him and broken up His serene contentment ; no danger had filled His spirit with anxiety and fear. On one occasion only could He say, " Now is My soul troubled." Out of all that life had presented to Him He had wrought out for Himself and for us peace. By calling it specifically " My peace " our Lord dis- tinguishes it from the peace which men ordinarily pursue. Some seek it by accommodating themselves to the world, by fixing for themselves a low standard and disbelieving in the possibility of living up to any high standard in this world. Some seek peace by giving the fullest possible gratification to all their desires ; they seek peace in external things — comfort, ease, plenty, pleasant connections. Some stifle anxiety about worldly i66 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. things by impressing on themselves that fretting does no good, and that what cannot be cured must be endured ; and any anxiety that might arise about their spiritual condition they stifle by the imagination that God is too great or too good to deal strictly with their shortcomings. Such kinds of peace, our Lord implies, are delusive. It is not outward things which can give peace of mind, no more than it is a soft couch which can give rest to a fevered body. Restfulness must be produced from within. There are, in fact, two roads to peace — we may conquer or we may be conquered. A country may always enjoy peace, if it is prepared always to submit to indignities, to accommodate itself to the demands of stronger parties, and absolutely to dismiss from its mind all ideas of honour or self-respect. This mode of obtaining peace has the advantages of easy and speedy attainment— advantages to which every man naturally attaches too high a value. For in the individual life we are daily choosing either the one peace or the other ; the unrighteous desires which distract us we are either conquering or being conquered by. We are either accepting the cheap peace that lies on this side of conflict, or we are attaining or striving towards the peace that lies on the other side of conflict. But the peace we gain by submission is both short-lived and delusive. It is short-lived, for a gratified desire is like a relieved beggar, who will quickly find his way back to you with his request rather enlarged than curtailed ; and it is delusive, because it is a peace which is the beginning of bondage of the worst kind. Any peace that is worth the having or worth the speaking about lies beyond, at the other side of conflict. We cannot long veil this from ourselves : we may decline the xiv. 22-31.] THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. 167 conflict and put off the evil day ; but still we are con- scious that we have not the peace our natures crave until we subdue the evil that is in us. We look and look for peace to distil upon us from without, to rise and shine upon us as to-morrow's sun, without effort of our own, and yet we know that such expectation is the merest delusion, and that peace must begin within, must be found in ourselves and not in our circum- stances. We know that until our truest purposes are in thorough harmony with our conscientious convictions we have no right to peace. We know that we can have no deep and lasting peace until v/e are satisfied with our own inward state, or are at least definitely on the road to satisfaction. Again, the peace of which Christ here speaks may be called His, as being wrought out by Him, and as being only attainable by others through His commu- nication of it to them. We do at first inquire with surprise how it is possible that any one can bequeath to us his own moral qualities. This, in fact, is what one often wishes were possible — that the father who by long discipline, by many painful experiences, has at last become meek and wise, could transmit these qualities to his son who has life all before him. As we read the notices of those who pass away from among us, it is the loss of so much moral force we mourn ; it may be, for all we know, as indispensable elsewhere, but nevertheless it is our loss, a loss for which no work done by the man, nor any works left behind him, compensate ; for the man is always, or generally, greater than his works, and what he has done only shows us the power and possibilities that are in him. Each generation needs to raise its own good men, not independent, certainly, of the past, but l68 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. not altogether inheriting what past generations have done ; just as each new year must raise its own crops, and only gets the benefit of past toil in the shape of improved land, good seed, better implements and methods of agriculture. Still, there is a transmission from father to son of moral qualities. What the father has painfully acquired may be found in the son by inheritance. And this is analogous to the trans- fusion of moral qualities from Christ to His people. For it is true of all the graces of the Christian, that they are first acquired by Christ, and only from Him derived to the Christian. It is of His fulness we all receive, and grace for grace. He is the Light at whom we must all kindle, the Source from whom all flows. How, then, does Christ communicate to us His peace or any of His own qualities — qualities in some instances acquired by personal experience and personal effort ? He gives us peace, first, by reconciling us to God by removing the burden of our past guilt and giving us access to God's favour. His work sheds quite a new light upon God ; reveals the fatherly love of God following us into our wandering and misery, and claim- ing us in our worst estate as His, acknowledging us and bidding us hope. Through Him we are brought back to the Father. He comes with this message from God, that He loves us. Am I, then, troubled about the past, about what I have done ? As life goes on, do I only see more and more clearly how thoroughly I have been a wrong-doer ? Does the present, as I live through it, only shed a brighter and brighter light on the evil of the past ? Do I fear the future as that which can only more and more painfully evolve the consequences of my past, wrong-doing ? Am I gradually awaking to the full and awful import of being a sinner ? After xiv. 22-31.] THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. 169 many years of a Christian profession, am I coming at last to see that above all else my life has been a life of sin, of shortcoming or evasion of duty, of deep con- sideration for my own pleasure or my own purpose, and utter or comparative regardlessness of God ? Are the slowly evolving circumstances of my life at length effecting what no preaching has ever effected ? are they making me understand that sin is the real evil, and that I am beset by it and my destiny entangled and ruled by it? To me, then, what offer could be more appropriate than the offer of peace ? From all fear of God and of myself I am called to peace in Christ. Reconcilement with God is the foundation, manifestly and of course, of all peace ; and this we have as Christ's direct gift to us. But this fundamental peace, though it will eventually pervade the whole man, does in point of fact only slowly develop into a peace such as our Lord Himself possessed. The peace which our Lord spoke of to His disciples, peace amidst all the ills of life, can only be attained by a real following of Christ, and a hearty and profound acceptance of His principles and spirit. And it is not the less His gift because we have thus to work for it, to alter or be altered wholly in our own inward being. It is not therefore a decep- tive bequest. When the father gives his son a good education, he cannot do so irrespective of the hard work of the son himself. When the general promises victory to his men, they do not expect to have it without fighting. And our Lord does not upset or supersede the fundamental laws of our nature and of our spiritual growth. He does not make effort of our own unnecessary ; He does not give us a ready-made character irrespective of the laws by which character grows, irrespective of deep-seated thirst for holiness I70 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. in ourselves and long-sustained conflict with outward obstacles and internal weaknesses and infidelities. But He helps us to peace, not only though primarily by bringing us back to God's favour, but also by show- ing us in His own person and hfe how peace is attained and preserved, and by communicating to us His Spirit to aid us in our efforts to attain it. He found out more perfectly than any one else the secret of peace ; and we are stirred by His example and success, not only as we are stirred by the example of any dead saint or sage with whom we have no present personal living fellowship, but as we are stirred by the example of a living Father who is always with us to infuse new heart into us, and to give us effectual counsel and aid. While we put forth our own efforts to win this self- conquest, and so school all within us as to enter into peace, Christ is with us securing that our efforts shall not be in. vain, giving us the fixed and clear idea of peace as our eternal condition, and giving us also whatever we need to win it. These words our Lord uttered at a time when, if ever. He was not likely to use words of course, to adopt traditional and misleading phrases. He loved the men He was speaking to, He knew He was after this to have few more opportunities of speaking with them. His love interpreted to Him the difficulties and troubles which would fall upon them, and this was the armour which He knew would bear them scathless through all. That His promise was fulfilled we know. We do not know what became of the majority of the Apostles, whether they did much or little ; but if we look at the men who stood out prominently in the early history of the Church, we see how much they stood in need of this peace and how truly they received it. Look at xiv. 22-31.] THE BEQUEST OF PEACE. 171 Stephen, sinking bruised and bleeding under the stones of a cursing mob, and say what characterises him — what makes his face shine and his Hps open in prayer for his murderers ? Look at Paul, driven out of one city, dragged lifeless out of another, clinging to a spar on a wild sea, stripped by robbers, arraigned before magis- trate after magistrate — what keeps his spirit serene, his purpose unshaken through a life such as this ? What put into his lips these valued words and taught him to say to others, " Rejoice evermore, and let the peace of God which passeth understanding keep your heart and mind " ? It was the fulfilment of this promise — a promise which is meant for us as for them. It will be fulfilled in us as in these men, not by a mere verbal petition, not bj a craving however strong, or a prayer however sincere, but by a true and profound acceptance of Christ, by a conscientious following of Him as our real leader, as that One from whom we take our ideas of life, of what is worthy and what is unworthy. XII. the' VINE AND THE BRANCHES. »73 "Arise, let us go hence. I am the true Vine, and My Father is the Husbandman. Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, He taketh it away : and every brancli that beareth fruit, He cleanseth it, tliat it may bear more fruit. Already ye are clean because of the word wliich I have spol