Part 15 (1/2)

Experience tells us that goodness has this effect upon minds in a certain condition. The bad that was in them it makes worse. The sight of love awakens and deepens hatred. If we believe and are sure that love has another power than this, that it is stronger than hatred, and can overcome hatred, let us cherish that faith. St. John certainly will not discourage us in it. No one demands it of us so much. But we must arrive at it, not through the denial of any facts, only through the fullest and frankest acknowledgment of them. This blinding, destructive effect of goodness and love upon the evil will, is a fact which we are bound to confess, and to tremble. It will force itself upon us, it will explain itself to us in ourselves, if we pretend to dispute it. If we own the danger, G.o.d will reveal to us the arm which can avert it; He will enable us to take in the mighty report of that power and love which can subdue all enemies.

The next words are also of the Evangelist. They contain partly a limitation of the former, partly an ill.u.s.tration of them.

'_Nevertheless among the chief rulers many believed on Him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess Him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: for they loved the praise of men more than the praise of G.o.d._' Only two verses before, the word which we render _praise_ here had been rendered _glory_. I do not know why the connexion should not have been kept up for the English reader, seeing that it must certainly have been present to the mind of the Apostle. A vision of glory, he seems to say, did dawn upon the hearts of these rulers. It was not the notion of an outward Christ which presented itself to them. There came to their inmost consciences the sense of a King who was over them, of a Word who was enlightening them. But there rose up beside this vision another which seemed to be nearer,--the vision of human glory, human reputation, respectability in the cla.s.s to which they belonged, the smile and good opinion of the Pharisee, the comfort of being called members of the synagogue. Brethren, which of us does not understand how this image might displace and banish the other,--how the hearts of these poor rulers, because they were like ours, might reject the n.o.ble to fondle and embrace the vile? Let us submit to be judged ourselves by the Apostle's words, instead of judging others. And let us ask that what we believe with our hearts we may confess with our lips; knowing that there is no condition so miserable as that of those who are enemies both to G.o.d and to His enemies; knowing that such must be, above all, enemies to themselves.

Here is the remedy against this state of mind:--'_Jesus cried and said, He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on Him that sent me. And he that seeth me, seeth Him that sent me. I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness. And if any man hear my words, and believe 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 words, hath one that judgeth him: the word that I have spoken, the same shall judge him in the last day. For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, He gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that His commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak._'

This was the summary of all that He had been teaching hitherto. Yet with what new force must it have come upon those who were halting between Jesus and the Pharisees, who were convinced that He was the true leader, and yet clung to the leaders of their sect! 'Belief in me is not belief in a chief of your choice. It is belief in the G.o.d of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the Father of your spirits. In me you see Him. I find you in darkness, ignorance of yourselves, of your relation to each other, of your relation to G.o.d. I am come a Light into the world,--a Light to show you what you are, where you are, what you have to do with your fellows, what you have to do with Him apart from whom you have no life. You _can_ refuse that Light; you can treat what I say as vain babbling, as coming from the inspiration of an evil spirit. I judge you not. I have come not to judge the world, but to save it out of its darkness; to bring it back to G.o.d. But the word that I speak, which is echoed in your consciences, which is testifying of G.o.d in them, that word will judge you in the last day; that will tell you who has been with you, who has been binding you to Himself when you have been tearing yourselves away. For I have not been uttering a word out of my own heart; I have not been setting up my own will. I have been obeying my Father's will, fulfilling His commandments. And I know that His commandment is life eternal. I know that it is life in itself, and that its effect is life. These words which I speak, do themselves issue from that Fountain of life; they are the words of the living Father; therefore, they are living and life-giving words.'

If we consider well the force of this parting testimony to the Jewish world, we shall be prepared to understand the words:--'_Now before the feast of the Pa.s.sover, when Jesus knew 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_.'

The Jewish sects had refused to believe in a Father. They had refused to believe in a Son of Man. They had refused to believe in a Lord of their own hearts. For a Father they had subst.i.tuted a lawgiver, who hated all Gentiles, and to whom Jews could only look up with terror, not with confidence. For a Son of Man they had subst.i.tuted their sect and its leaders. For a Lord over their hearts they had subst.i.tuted the notion of an outward Christ, who was to be identified by certain particulars of place and time, which must be ascertained by studying the letters of a book. The hour was come when all these contradictions would reach their highest point, when the sects would combine to show what was the real point of their agreement; to Whom they were equally opposed. The feast of the Pa.s.sover was to be the crisis which would reveal the dark thoughts that were in them; which would show what they were, and what Jesus was. He knew that the moment was come when the question was to be decided, whether men have a Father, or are orphans; whether they have a living Head, or are the loose, broken limbs of a body which has none; whether they are to be governed as horses and mules are governed, by bit and bridle, or as spirits are governed, by a higher Spirit. He had chosen His Apostles to testify to their own nation, and to all nations, of Him and of His Father. He had held them together by His own love, when there was that in the world, and that in themselves, which would have separated them. Had anything happened to break this bond between them and Him? If He left the world, if He returned to His Father, would it be broken?

These were the questions which that Pa.s.sover-night was to answer.

Perhaps you will think that as I have spoken so much of Christ's love to the world, of Christ as the Son of Man, I may shrink from what seems the exclusive tone of this sentence: '_He loved_ His own; _He loved_ them _to the end_.' Shrink from it! No, brethren, I would do the utmost to bring forth the full force of these words; to impress their meaning upon you. I would have you observe how carefully we are told that these disciples were chosen by Him; that His love to them did not depend upon their faith, but their faith upon His love. I would have you observe how this love was manifested to them all as a body--to one and another of them individually; how they were taught that it was only this love which was sustaining them then, or could sustain them afterwards. Unless we do that, we shall never understand how they were witnesses against that religious world out of which they were called,--that world of sects and parties,--that world where all were choosing for themselves, and none were acknowledging a loving Will which was ruling them; where all were striving for their own views and opinions, and none were confessing their relations to each other; where each was fighting for ascendency, and none was content to be a servant. We shall never understand how these Apostles were witnesses for the original calling of their nation, how they really represented the tribes in which G.o.d had put His name, and through which all the families of the earth were to be blessed. We shall never understand what that Church was which they were to bring out of these twelve tribes to be a witness to the world what its relation to G.o.d was, and how, by forgetting that relation, it had sunk into a poor, dark, divided, selfish world.

If we look upon His last supper as the special education of the Apostles for that work which they had to do in the world, we shall prize the part of this Gospel upon which we are now entering; we shall perceive how all the discourses of our Lord that are recorded in the other Evangelists, from the time that they left their fathers' s.h.i.+ps, or the receipt of custom, till the time that He entered with them into Jerusalem, find their fullest ill.u.s.tration, their deepest root, in the dialogues and in the prayer which St. John has reported to us; we shall perceive how the inst.i.tution of the Eucharist--which, as I said when I was speaking of the discourse at Capernaum, it was no part of St. John's function to announce--is more perfectly explained, both in its principle and its effects, by these specially sacramental interviews, than it is in any other part of the New Testament. And we shall begin to enter--it can be but the beginning of a lesson which must last to our life's end--into the purport of that sign which, whether it preceded or followed the giving the bread and the pouring out of the wine, teaches us how they are to be received.

'_And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him; Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into His hands, and that He was come from G.o.d, and went to G.o.d; He riseth from supper, and laid aside His garments; and took a towel, and girded Himself. After that He poureth water into a bason, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith He was girded._'

Two hints are given to us which may a.s.sist us in entering into the meaning of this act, though, at first, they seem as if they had little connexion with it. First, St. John speaks of what had taken place and was taking place in the mind of Judas; secondly, of the knowledge which was in the mind of Jesus, that He was come from His Father and was going to Him. What has the condition of the betrayer's heart to do with this was.h.i.+ng? We are to learn, I apprehend, that the very corruption which was in _that_ heart,--the very evil which had ripened into the darkest of all purposes there,--was that from which all the disciples had need to be cleansed. Whatever else the was.h.i.+ng symbolized, it certainly imported the existence of _this_ defilement, and that there was One who could remove it. Who could take the deep stain of covetousness, of selfishness, away from the heart of man, away from a human society? Only He who had come from the Father of love, that He might enter into the strictest and closest fellows.h.i.+p with human beings in their lowest estate, in all their peculiar and individual misery. Only He, who was going to the Father, that He might unite all in Himself. And He, knowing that He had come for this end, and was going away that He might accomplish it fully, He gives a pledge to the disciples that when He was seemingly absent from them, He would always be with them to do this work for them. He would be always near them to cleanse them from that pride and selfishness which would hinder them from being at one with each other, and from showing forth His mind to the world.

'_Then cometh He to Simon Peter: and Peter 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 know hereafter. Peter saith unto Him, Thou shalt 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._'

On St. Peter's-day you will not suppose that I could pa.s.s over these words; they ill.u.s.trate so strikingly, as other parts of this chapter do, the character of him whom we are commemorating. They ill.u.s.trate the particular education to which he was subjected; the education which is needed for the impatient and self-confident man, who must be kept waiting, that his eagerness to know, which is in itself a blessing, may not become a curse; who must often have the very thoughts and convictions which are most honest and appear most indisputable, turned upside down, that he may not exult in them as _his_ thoughts and _his_ convictions, and so change the truth that is in them into falsehood. But the lesson, though peculiarly applicable to him, is a universal one, and shows the universal worth of Christ's sign. It is true of all symbols, that we can know little of them at first. The experience of life interprets them. And it is the hardest thing for all of us to believe that the Highest must wait upon the lowest; that it is not humility, but pride, to refuse the service.

Wonderful thought to take in! G.o.d must stoop, or man cannot stoop. We must set ourselves up as G.o.ds, unless we believe that G.o.d's glory is shown in doing the lowest offices of a man.

But why was not Peter right in that other prayer of his,--'_Not my feet only, but also my hands and my head_?' Did he not want a thorough cleansing? Does not each of us want it? The question is one which requires the most careful answer. If the Bible did not give it in the most express terms, we should be utterly at a loss where to find it.

But from first to last the Jewish nation is spoken of as a pure and holy nation by those lawgivers and prophets who complain of its members for being stiff-necked and rebellious. There is nothing which the prophets are so earnest in as in persuading their countrymen that they are the people of G.o.d's covenant, and are therefore a holy people; that they are _forgetting_ His covenant, and _so_ are making themselves unholy. They call upon the people to repent and turn to G.o.d, and then He will restore them, He will purify them; the hearts which are red as scarlet, shall become as white as wool. The Jewish sects did not in the least understand this truth. They looked for an individual holiness, an individual cleanness, apart from the holiness of their nation. Each member of them wanted a holiness of his own; he regarded his race as unholy. He did not repent of the sins which kept him from sharing in the holiness which they all had in G.o.d.

Now our Lord was educating _His_ disciples out of this falsehood into which their age had fallen, this falsehood which was so natural to every one of them. He came to show them on what ground the holiness of their nation stood. It had been called and chosen in Him. It was His righteousness, and not the righteousness of its individual members, which justified the t.i.tles that had been bestowed upon it. These members were righteous only so far as they rose out of themselves; as they submitted to the righteousness of G.o.d. It was, therefore, His first lesson to His disciples that, as a body, they were clean and holy because He had called them and they were complete in Him.

'_Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all. For He knew who should betray Him; therefore said He, Ye are not all clean._'

They were clean as a body, as a family. Each had need to be purified from his own individual selfishness which kept him apart from the family, which kept him from claiming the common righteousness of his Lord. But they were not all clean. There was one who had wrapt himself up in his individual nature,--one solitary, selfish being, who would have nothing to do with the family,--who would have nothing to do with the common Lord, the Son of Man; one who had sold his heart to the divider, to the spirit of selfishness and evil. I do not know anything which ill.u.s.trates more clearly the sense in which the Apostles, as a body, were clean than this terrible exception; or anything which explains more clearly what need they would have for that daily cleansing of the feet of which He had given them a pledge.

'_So after He had washed their feet, and had taken His garments, and was set down again, He said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his Lord; neither He that is sent greater than He that sent Him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them._'

In the last century, preachers were wont to speak continually of our Lord as an example. In our time there has been a kind of revolt against that phrase as a hard and even as an unpractical one. 'It is very well,' we say, 'to have an example; but can we follow it? Christ is divine, and we are human. No doubt He was human, too, in a sense; but then surely His divinity helped His humanity, so as to put all His acts at an immeasurable distance from ours.' I believe there is a genuine feeling at the bottom of this complaint. I believe it is a very wearisome and a very useless thing to talk to men about examples, unless you can show how that he who exhibits the example has some connexion with them, and some power over them. But, on the other hand, we are bound to inquire what has been the effect of example upon the world, how the men whom we meet with that are better than ourselves operate upon us, how it is that we can be impressed by the records of men who have departed. Christ's divinity is not a hindrance to our understanding the might of His example; it rather explains to us the whole doctrine and law of example. Are not that doctrine and law to be found in this pa.s.sage? If He were not the Master and Lord, if the disciples did not say well in calling Him so, then His act would have been a solitary one, belonging to Himself, one which they could not imitate; but if He were their Lord in the highest sense of the word, in that sense which John has been setting forth to us throughout his Gospel,--if He were the Word in whom they had been created, the Word who was their life and their light, the Word from whom every energy of their spirits was derived,--then everything which dwelt in Him could descend upon them; whatever shone forth in Him could be reflected in them. And this would take place, not by their raising themselves to contemplate a lofty ideal, but by their submitting to a gracious and loving Will. The Highest of all showed Himself to them in was.h.i.+ng their feet. All they had to do was not to think themselves greater than He, not to think that unworthy of the disciple which was not unworthy of the Lord.

The difficulty to the formal divine is no doubt this:--'If cleansing the feet symbolizes the removing of defilements from the inner man, is not that Christ's work alone? Can the disciple follow His example in doing that work?' Our consciences tell us that he can. We do know that we may receive purification from one another, that the tenderness, and love, and patience of one man act in a marvellous way upon another, when those qualities seem the furthest from him, when he most confesses that they do not belong to him. We do not set ourselves deliberately to follow examples. The examples get the mastery over us; there is a life in the men who exhibit them which awakens life in us.

These are facts not to be gainsaid for the sake of any system. Upon them have been built theories about the righteousness of the saints, and the transference of one man's righteousness to another, which are, no doubt, very immoral and unG.o.dly. But St. Paul's words, which are the plea for these theories, '_I fill up in my body the sufferings of Christ_,' are both moral and G.o.dly. For they are grounded upon the idea which St. John is setting forth here: that Christ, the Divine Sufferer, is the source of all purification and of all life; and that all men, in their proper spheres, may share His sufferings, and transmit and communicate the purification and life that flow from them to their fellows. All difficulties about example are capable of that solution. If we are members of one body, if He is the Head, why should not there be a continual circulation of life from each member of the body to every other? How can the departure of men out of this world hinder that circulation, or cause us who are here to feel it less? May not their power have become greater as the mortal fetters have been taken from them? May not we feel it more?

That is a strange announcement,--'_The disciple is not above His master_,'--to be introduced by a '_Verily_;' and yet the longer the Apostles lived, the more they understood what need they had to be told this truth, and told it with such solemnity. What follows reminds us that a commonplace in words may become a paradox in action, and that we never experience either the difficulty of a divine sentence, or the power of it, till we put it in practice. All the crimes of Churchmen from that hour to this, all their cowardice, their arrogance, their baseness, their violence, have had this one root: the servants of Christ have believed themselves greater than Christ; they have counted it a shame and disgrace to do what He did, to endure what He endured.

Here has been the cause of their powerlessness; the very secret of His power has been wanting in them. They have put forth the mock power which His real power has come into the world to crush and subdue. Does not the Christian power--the Church's power--_begin_ when it has been brought to work _with_ this power of Him who humbled Himself, and not against it? Do we want another ground for believing that those who have completely washed their robes and made them white from every stain of selfishness in the blood of the Lamb, must be mightier than they were here? Do we want another explanation of the fact, that those words of theirs which spoke out the true mind of Christ in them, live and are fruitful for generations after their names, and all the efforts they made to magnify their own names, have been forgotten?

'_I spake not of you all: I know whom I have chosen: but that the Scripture may be fulfilled, He that eateth bread with me hath lifted up his heel against me. Now I tell you before it come, that, when it is come to pa.s.s, 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 spirit, and testified, and said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me._'

How are these verses connected with those that went before them? how are they connected with each other? Sometimes the thought comes to us,--'Can we trace the processes of that Mind in that hour? Must not His words spring out of depths into which our eyes can never look?

Must they not follow each other in an order which is altogether unlike that of other men?' So far as such a doubt leads to reverence,--so far as it makes us distrust our own perceptions, eager to learn from others, certain that we can but see the smallest portion of that which is in Him, I would cherish it. So far as it puts Christ at a distance from us, as it tempts us to think that He was not the Son of Man feeling perfectly as a man,--that He did not mean that the things He said to us should be apprehended by us, and that He will not help us to apprehend them,--so far I would eschew it, and cast it off; because it is fatal to all sincere reverence and sincere humility.