Volume I Part 46 (1/2)

CHRIST FORESEEING HIS Pa.s.sION

'Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world cometh, and 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. 30,31.

The summons to departure which closes these verses shows that we have now reached the end of that sacred hour in the upper room. In obedience to the summons, we have to fancy the little group leaving its safe shelter, as sailors might put out from behind a breakwater into a stormy sea. They pa.s.s from its seclusion and peace into the joyous stir of the crowded streets, filled with feast-keeping mult.i.tudes, on whom the full paschal moon looked down, pure and calming. Somewhere between the upper chamber and the crossing of the brook Kedron, the divine words of the following chapters were spoken, but this discourse, closely connected as it is with them, reaches its fitting close in these penetrating, solemn words of outlook into the near future, so calm, so weighty, so resolute, so almost triumphant, with which Christ seeks finally to impart to His timorous friends some of His own peace and a.s.surance of victory.

They lead us into a region seldom opened to our view, and never to be looked upon but with reverent awe. For they tell us what Christ thought about His sufferings, and how He felt as He went down to that cold, black river, in which He was to be baptized. 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place where thou standest is holy ground.'

So, reverently listening to the words, sacred because of the Speaker, the theme, and the circ.u.mstances, we note in them these things: His calm antic.i.p.ation of the a.s.sailant, His unveiling of the secret and motive of His apparent defeat, and His resolute advance to the conflict. Let us look at these three points.

I. First, we have here our Lord's calm antic.i.p.ation of the a.s.sailant.

'Hereafter I will not talk much with you: for the Prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me.' One of the other Gospels tells us, in finis.h.i.+ng its account of our Lord's temptation in the wilderness, that when Satan had ended all these temptations 'he departed from Him for a season.' And now we have the second and the intenser form of that a.s.sault. The first was addressed to desires, and sought to stimulate ambition and ostentation and the animal appet.i.tes, and so, through the cravings of human nature, to shake the Master's fixed faith. The second used sharper and more fatal weapons, and appealed, not to desire of enjoyment, or ease, or good, but to the natural human shrinking from pain and suffering and shame and death. He that was impervious on the side of natural necessities and more subtle spiritual desires might yet be reached through terror. And so the second form of the a.s.sault, instead of tempting the traveller by the suns.h.i.+ne to cast aside his cloak, tempted him by storm and tempest to fling it aside; and the one, as the other, was doomed to failure.

Note how the Master, with that clear eye which saw to the depths as well as the heights, and before which men and things were but, as it were, transparent media through which unseen spiritual powers wrought, just as He discerns the Father's will as supreme and sovereign, sees here--beneath Judas's treachery, and Pharisees' and priests' envy, and the people's stolid indifference, and the Roman soldiers' impartial scorn--the workings of a personal source and centre of all. The 'Prince of this world,' who rules men and things when they are severed from G.o.d, 'cometh.' Christ's sensitive nature apprehends the approach of the evil thing, as some organisations can tell when a thunderstorm is about to burst. His divine Omniscience, working as it did, even within the limits of humanity, knows not only when the storm is about to burst upon Him, but knows who it is that has raised the tempest.

And so He says, 'The Prince of this world cometh.'

But note, as yet more important, that tremendous and unique consciousness of absolute invulnerability against the a.s.saults. 'He hath nothing in Me.' He is 'the Prince of the world,' but His dominion stops outside My breast. He has no rule or authority there. His writs do not run, nor is His dominion recognised, within that sacred realm.

Was there ever a man who could say that? Are there any of us, the purest and the n.o.blest, who, standing single-handed in front of the antagonistic power of evil, and believing it to be consolidated and consecrated in a person, dare to profess that there is not a thing in us on which he can lay his black claw and say--'That is mine?' Is there nothing inflammable within us which the 'fiery darts of the wicked' can kindle? Are there any of us who bar our doors so tightly as that we can say that none of his seductions will find their way therein, and that nothing there will respond to them? Christ sets Himself here against the whole embattled and embodied power of evil, and puts Himself in contrast to the universal human experience, when He calmly declares 'He hath nothing in Me.' It is an a.s.sertion of His absolute freedom from sinfulness, and it involves, as I take it, the other a.s.sertion--that as He is free from sin, so He is not subject to that consequence of sin, which is death, as we know it. Another part of Scripture speaks to us in strange language, which yet has in it a deep truth, of 'him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.'

Men fall under the rightful dominion of the king of evil when they sin, and part of the proof of his dominion is the fact of physical death, with its present accompaniments. Thus, in His calm antic.i.p.ation, Jesus stands waiting for the enemy's charge, knowing that all its forces will be broken against the serried ranks of His immaculate purity, and that He will come from the dreadful close unwounded all, and triumphant for evermore.

But do not let us suppose that because Christ, in His antic.i.p.ation of suffering and death, knew Himself invulnerable, with not even a spot on His heel into which the arrow could go, therefore the conflict was an unreal or shadowy one. It was a true fight, and it was a real struggle that He was antic.i.p.ating, thus calmly in these solemn words, as knowing Himself the Victor ere He entered on the dreadful field.

II. So note, secondly, in these words, our Lord's unveiling of the motive and aim of His apparent defeat.

'But that the world might know that I love the Father, and, as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do.' There may be some uncertainty about the exact grammatical relation of these clauses to one another, with which I need not trouble you, because it does not affect their substantial meaning. However we solve the mere grammatical questions, the fundamental significance of the whole remains unaffected, and it is this: that Christ's sufferings and death were, in one aspect, for the purpose that the world might know His love to the Father, and, in another aspect, were obedience to the Father's commandment. And if we consider these two aspects, I think we shall get some thoughts worth considering as to the way in which the Master Himself looks upon these sufferings and that death.

The first point I note in this division of my discourse is that Christ would have us regard His sufferings and His death as His own act. Note that remarkable phrase, 'thus I _do_.' A strange word to be used in such a connection, but full of profound meaning. We speak, and rightly, of the solemn events of these coming days as the pa.s.sion of our Lord, but they were His action quite as much as His pa.s.sion. He was no mere pa.s.sive sufferer. In them all He acted, or, as He says here, we may look upon them all, not as things inflicted upon Him from without by any power, however it might seem to have the absolute control of His fate, but as things which He did Himself.