Volume II Part 14 (1/2)

II. Secondly, note here that strange forward look of the dying Man: 'I have declared Thy name and _will declare it_.'

And that was said within eight and forty hours of the Cross, which, if He had been a simple human teacher and martyr, would have ended all His activity in the world. But here He is not merely summing up His life, and laying it aside, writing the last sentence, as it were, which gathers up the whole of the completed book, but He is closing the first volume, and in the act of doing so He stretches out His hand to open the second. 'I will declare it.' When? How? Did not earthly life, then, put a stop to this Teacher's activity? Was there still prophetic function to be done after death had sealed His lips? Certainly.

That antic.i.p.ation, which at once differentiates Him from all the brood of merely human teachers and prophets, even the highest, does indeed include as future, at the moment when He speaks, the swiftly coming and close Cross; but it goes beyond it. How much of Christendom's knowledge of G.o.d depended upon the Pa.s.sion, on the threshold of which Christ was standing? He, hanging on the Cross in weakness, and dying there amidst the darkness that overspread the land, is a strange Revealer of the omnipotent, infinite, ever-blessed G.o.d. But Oh! if we strike Gethsemane and Calvary out of Christ's manifestation of the Father, how infinitely poorer are we and the world! 'G.o.d commendeth,' (rather 'establisheth,') 'His love toward us in that whilst we were yet sinners Christ died for us.' And so as we turn ourselves to the little knoll outside the gate, where the Nazarene carpenter hangs faint and dying, we--wonder of Wonders, and yet certainty of certainties!--have to say, 'Lo! this is our G.o.d; we have waited for Him.'

But that future revelation extends beyond the Cross, and includes resurrection, ascension, Pentecost, and the whole history of the Church right onwards through the ages. The difference between the two volumes of revelation--that which includes the work of Christ upon earth, and that which includes His revelation from the heavens--is this, that the first volume contains all the facts, and the second volume contains His interpretation and application of the facts in the understandings and hearts of His people. We have no more facts from which to construe G.o.d than these which belong to the earthly life of Jesus Christ, and we never shall have, here at all events. But whilst the first volume to the bottom of the last page is finished and tolerates and needs no additions, day by day, moment by moment, epoch by epoch Christ is bringing His people to a fuller understanding of the significance of the first volume, and writing the second more and more upon their hearts.

So we have an ever-living Christ, still the active Teacher of His Church. Times of unsettlement and revolutionary change and the 'shaking of the things that are made,' like the times in which we live, are but times in which the great Teacher is setting some new lesson from the old Book to His slow scholars. There is always a little confusion in the schoolroom when the cla.s.ses are being rearranged and new books are being put into old hands. The tributary stream, as it rushes in, makes broken water for a moment. Do not let us be afraid when 'the things that can be shaken' shake, but let us see in the shaking the attendant of a new curriculum on which the great Teacher is launching His scholars, and let us learn the new lessons of the old Gospel which He is then teaching.

III. Thirdly, note the partic.i.p.ation in the Father's love which is the issue of the knowledge of the Father's name.

Christ says that His end, an end which is surely attained in the declaration of the divine name, is that 'the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them.' We are here touching upon heights too dizzy for free and safe walking, on glories too bright for close and steady gaze. But where Christ has spoken we may reverently follow. Mark, then, that marvellous thought of the ident.i.ty between the love which was His and the love which is ours. 'From everlasting' that divine love lay on the Eternal Word which in the h.o.a.ry beginning, before the beginning of creatures, 'was with G.o.d, and was G.o.d.' The deepest conception that we can form of the divine nature is of a Being who in Himself carries the Subject and the Object of an eternal love, which we speak of in the deep emblem of 'the Word,' and the G.o.d with whom He eternally 'was.'

That love lay upon Christ, without limitation, without reservation, without interruption, finding nothing there from which it recoiled, and nothing there which did not respond to it. No mist, no thunderstorm, ever broke that suns.h.i.+ne, no tempest ever swept across that calm.

Continuous, full, perfect was the love that knit the Father to the Son, and continuous, full, and perfect was the consciousness of abiding in that love, which lay like light upon the spirit of Him that said 'I delight to do Thy will.' 'The Father hath not left Me alone.'

And all that love Christ gives to us as deep, as continuous, as unreserved. Our consciousness of G.o.d's love is meant by Christ to be like His own. Alas! alas! is that our experience, Christian people? The sun always s.h.i.+nes on the rainless land of Egypt, except for a month or two in the year. The contrast between the unclouded blue and continuous light and heat there, and our murky skies and humid atmosphere, is like the contrast between our broken and feeble consciousness of the s.h.i.+ning of the divine love and the uninterrupted glory of light and joy of communion which poured on Christ's heart. But it is possible for us indefinitely to approximate to such an experience; and the way by which we reach it is that plain and simple one of accepting Christ's declaration of the Father's name.

IV. And so, lastly, notice the indwelling Christ who makes our partic.i.p.ation in the divine love possible: 'And I in them.'

One may well say, 'How can it be that love should be transferred? How can it be that the love of G.o.d to me shall be identical with the love of G.o.d to Christ?' There is only one answer. If Christ dwells in me, then G.o.d's love to Him falls upon me by no transference, but by my incorporation into Him. And I would urge that this great truth of the actual indwelling of Christ in the soul is no mere piece of rhetorical exaggeration, nor a wild and enthusiastic way of putting the fact that the influence of His teaching and the beauty of His example can sway us; but it is a plain and absolute truth that the divine Christ can come into and abide in the narrow room of our poor hearts. And if He does this, then 'he that is joined to the Lord is one Spirit'; and the Christ in me receives the suns.h.i.+ne of the divine love. That does not destroy, but heightens, my individuality. I am more and not less myself because 'I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.'

So, dear brethren! it all comes to this--we may each of us, if we will, have Jesus Christ for Guest and Inhabitant in our hearts. If we have, then, since G.o.d loves Him, He must love me who have Him within me, and as long as G.o.d loves Christ He cannot cease to love me, nor can I cease to be conscious of His love to me, and whatsoever gifts His love bestows upon Jesus, pa.s.s over in measure, and partially, to myself.

Thus immortality, heaven, glory, all blessedness in heaven and earth, are the fruit and crystallisation, so to speak, of that oneness with Christ which is possible for us. And the conditions are simply that we shall with joyful trust accept His declaration of the Father's name, and see G.o.d manifest in Him; and welcome in our inmost hearts that great Gospel. Then His prayer, and the travail of His soul, will reach their end even in me, and 'the love wherewith the Father loved the Son shall be in me,' and the Son Himself shall dwell in my heart.

CHRIST AND HIS CAPTORS

'As soon then as He had said unto them, I am He, they went backward, and fell to the ground. Then asked He them again, Whom seek ye? And they said, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I have told you that I am He: if therefore ye seek Me, let these go their way: That the saying might be fulfilled, which He spake, Of them which Thou gayest Me have I lost none.'--JOHN xviii. 6-9.

This remarkable incident is narrated by John only. It fits in with the purpose which he himself tells us governed his selection of the incidents which he records. 'These things are written,' says he, near the end of the Gospel, 'that ye might believe that Jesus is the Son of G.o.d, and that, believing, ye might have life in His name.' The whole of the peculiarities of the substance of John's Gospel are to be explained on the two grounds that he was writing a supplement to, and not a subst.i.tute for, or a correction of, the Gospels already in existence; and that his special business was to narrate such facts and words as set forth the glory of Christ as 'the Only Begotten of the Father.'

The incident before us is, as I think, one of these. The Evangelist would have us see in it, as I gather from his manner of narrating it, mainly three things. He emphasises that strange recoil of the would-be captors before Christ's majestic, calm 'I am He'; that was a manifestation of Christ's glory. He emphasises our Lord's patient standing there, in the midst of the awe-struck crowd, and even inciting them, as it would seem, to do the work for which they had come out; that was a manifestation of the voluntariness of Christ's sufferings.

And He emphasises the self-forgetting care with which at that supreme moment He steps between His faithless, weak friends and danger, with the wonderful words, 'If ye seek Me, let these go their way'; to the Evangelist that little incident is an ill.u.s.tration, on a very low level, and in regard to a comparatively trivial matter, of the very same principle by which salvation from all evil in time and in eternity, is guaranteed to all that believe on Him:--

I. First, then, consider this remarkable, momentary manifestation of our Lord's glory.

'I am He!' When the Band were thus doubly a.s.sured by the traitor's kiss and by His own confession, why did they not lay hands upon Him? There He stood in the midst of them, alone, defenceless; there was nothing to hinder their binding Him on the spot. Instead of that they recoil, and fall in a huddled heap before Him. Some strange awe and terror, of which they themselves could have given no account, was upon their spirits. How came it about? Many things may have conspired to produce it. I am by no means anxious to insist that this was a miracle. Things of the same sort, though much less in degree, have been often enough seen; when some innocent and ill.u.s.trious victim has for a moment paralysed the hands of his would-be captors and made them feel, though it were but transiently, 'how awful goodness is.' There must have been many in that band who had heard Him, though, in the uncertain light of quivering moonbeams and smoking torches, they failed to recognise Him till He spoke. There must have been many more who had heard of Him, and many who suspected that they were about to lay hands on a holy man, perhaps on a prophet. There must have been reluctant tools among the inferiors, and no doubt some among the leaders whoso consciences needed but a touch to be roused to action. To all, His calmness and dignity would appeal, and the manifest freedom from fear or desire to flee would tend to deepen the strange thoughts which began to stir in their hearts.

But the impression which the narrative seems intended to leave, appears to me to be of something more than this. It looks as if there were something more than human in Christ's look and tone. It may have been the same in kind as the ascendency which a pure and calm nature has over rude and inferior ones. It may have been the same in kind as has sometimes made the headsman on the scaffold pause before he struck, and has bowed rude gaolers into converts before some grey-haired saint or virgin martyr; yet the difference is so great in degree as practically to become quite another thing. Though I do not want to insist upon any 'miraculous' explanation of the cause of this incident, yet I would ask, May it not be that here we see, perhaps apart from Christ's will altogether, rising up for one moment to the surface, the indwelling majesty which was always there?

We do not know the laws that regulated the dwelling of the G.o.dhead, bodily, within that human frame, but we do know that at one other time there came upon His features a transfiguration, and over His very garments a l.u.s.tre which was not thrown upon them from without, but rose up from within. And I am inclined to think that here, as there, though under such widely different circ.u.mstances and to such various issues, there was for a moment a little rending of the veil of His flesh, and an emission of some flash of the brightness that always tabernacled within Him; and that, therefore, just as Isaiah, when He saw the King in His glory, said, 'Woe is me, for I am undone!' and just as Moses could not look upon the Face, but could only see the back parts, so here the one stray beam of manifest divinity that shot through the crevice, as it were, for an instant, was enough to prostrate with a strange awe even those rude and insensitive men. When He had said 'I am He,' there was something that made them feel, 'This is One before whom violence cowers abashed, and in whose presence impurity has to hide its face.' I do not a.s.sert that this is the explanation of that panic terror. I only ask, May it not be?

But whatever we may think was the reason, at all events the incident brings out very strikingly the elevation and dignity of Christ, and the powerful impressions made by His personality, even at such a time of humiliation. This Evangelist is always careful to bring out the glory of Christ, especially when that glory lies side by side with His lowliness. The blending of these two is one of the remarkable features in the New Testament portraiture of Jesus Christ. Wherever in our Lord's life any incident indicates more emphatically than usual the lowliness of His humiliation, there, by the side of it, you get something that indicates the majesty of His glory. For instance, He is born a weak infant, but angels herald His birth; He lies in a manger, but a star hangs trembling above it, and leads sages from afar, with their myrrh, and incense, and gold. He submits Himself to the baptism of repentance, but the heavens open and a voice proclaims, 'This is My beloved Son!' He sits wearied, on the stone coping of the well, and craves for water from a peasant woman; but He gives her the Water of Life. He lies down and sleeps, from pure exhaustion, in the stern of the little fis.h.i.+ng-boat, but He wakes to command the storm, and it is still. He weeps beside the grave, but He flings His voice into its inmost recesses, and the sheeted dead comes forth. He well-nigh faints under the agony in the garden, but an angel from Heaven strengthens Him. He stands a prisoner at a human bar, but He judges and condemns His judges. He dies, and that hour of defeat is His hour of triumph, and the union of shame and glory is most conspicuous in that hour when on the Cross the 'Son of Man is _glorified_, and G.o.d is glorified in Him.'

This strange blending of opposites--the glory in the lowliness, and the abas.e.m.e.nt in the glory--is the keynote of this singular event. He will be 'delivered into the hands of men.' Yes; but ere He is delivered He pauses for an instant, and in that instant comes a flash 'above the brightness of the noonday sun' to tell of the hidden glory.

Do not forget that we may well look upon that incident as a prophecy of what shall be. As one of the suggestive, old commentators on this verse says: 'He will say ”I am He,” again, a third time. What will He do coming to reign, when He did this coming to die? And what will His manifestation be as a Judge when this was the effect of the manifestation as He went to be judged?' 'Every eye shall see Him'; and they that loved not His appearing shall fall before Him when He cometh to be our Judge; and shall call on the rocks and the hills to cover them.

II. There is here, secondly, a manifestation of the voluntariness of our Lord's suffering.

When that terrified mob recoiled from Him, why did He stand there so patiently? The time was propitious for flight, if He had cared to flee.