Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Volume I Part 39

Christ, as I have been saying, is Heaven. His presence is all that we need for peace, for joy, for purity, for rest, for love, for growth.

To be 'with Him,' as He tells us in another part of these wonderful last words in the upper chamber, is to 'behold His glory.' And to behold His glory, as John tells us in his Epistle, is to be like Him.

So Christ's presence means the communication to us of all the l.u.s.tre of His radiance, of all the whiteness of His purity, of all the depth of His blessedness, and of a share in His wondrous dominion. His glorified manhood will pa.s.s into ours, and they that are with Him where He is will rest as in the centre and home of their spirits, and find Him all-sufficient. His presence is my Heaven.

That is almost all we know. Oh! it is more than all we need to know.

The curtain is the picture. It is because what is there transcends in glory all our present experience that Scripture can only hint at it and describe it by negations--such as 'no night,' 'no sorrow,' 'no tears,' 'former things pa.s.sed away'; and by symbols of glory and l.u.s.tre gathered from all that is loftiest and n.o.blest in human buildings and society. But all these are but secondary and poor. The living heart of the hope, and the lambent centre of the brightness, is, 'So shall we ever be with the Lord.'

And it is enough. It is enough to make the bond of union between us in the outer court and them in the holy place. Parted friends will fix to look at the same star at the same moment of the night and feel some union; and if we from amidst the clouds of earth, and they from amidst the pure radiance of their heaven, turn our eyes to the same Christ, we are not far apart. If He be the companion of each of us, He reaches a hand to each, and, clasping it, the parted ones are united; and 'whether we wake or sleep we live _together_,' because we both live with Him.

Brother! Is Jesus Christ so much to you that a heaven which consists in nearness and likeness to Him has any attraction for you? Let Him be your Saviour, your Sacrifice, your Helper, your Companion. Obey Him as your King, love Him as your Friend, trust Him as your All. And be sure that then the darkness will be but the shadow of His hand, and instead of dreading death as that which separates you from life and love and action and joy, you will be able to meet it peacefully, as that which rends the thin veil, and unites you with Him who is the Heaven of heavens.

He has gone to prepare a place for us. And if we will let Him, He will prepare us for the place, and then come and lead us thither. 'Thou wilt show me the path of life' which leads through death. 'In Thy presence is fullness of joy, and at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'

THE WAY

'And whither I go ye know, and the way ye know. Thomas saith unto Him, Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; and how can we know the way?

Jesus saith unto him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by Me. If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also: and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.'--JOHN xiv. 4-7.

Our Lord has been speaking of His departure, of its purpose, of His return as guaranteed by that purpose, and of His servants' eternal and perfect reunion with Him. But even these cheering and calming thoughts do not exhaust His consolations, as they did not satisfy all the disciples' needs. They might still have said, 'Yes; we believe that You will come back again, and we believe that we shall be together; but what about the parenthesis of absence?' And here is the answer, or at least part of it: 'Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know'; or, if we adopt the shortened form which the Revised Version gives us, 'Whither I go ye know the way.'

When you say to a man, 'You know the way,' you mean 'Come.' And in these words there lie, as it seems to me, a veiled invitation to the disciples to come to Him before He came back for them, and the a.s.surance that they, though separated, might still find and tread the road to the Father's house, and so be with Him still. They are not left desolate. The Christ who is absent is present as the path to Himself. And so the parenthesis is bridged across. Now in these verses we have several large and important lessons which I think may best be drawn by simply seeking to follow their course.

I. Observe the disciples' unconscious knowledge.

Jesus Christ says: 'Ye know the way and ye know the goal.' One of them ventures flatly to contradict Him, and to traverse both a.s.sertions with a brusque and thorough-going negative. 'We do _not_ know whither Thou goest,' says Thomas; 'how can we know the way?' He is the same man in this conversation that we find him in the interview before our Lord's journey to raise Lazarus, and in the interview after our Lord's resurrection. In all three cases he appears as mainly under the dominion of sense, as slow to apprehend anything beyond its limits, as morbidly melancholy and disposed to take the blackest possible view of things--a practical pessimist--and yet with a certain kind of frank outspokenness which half redeems the other characteristics from blame.

He could not understand all the Lord's deep words just spoken. His mind was befogged and dimmed, and he blurts out his ignorance, knowing that the best place to carry it to is to the Illuminator who can make it light.

'We know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way?' Was Jesus right? was Thomas right? or were they both right? The fact is that Thomas and all his fellows knew, after a fas.h.i.+on, but they did not know that they knew. They had heard much in the past as to where Christ was going. Plainly enough it had been rung in their ears over and over again. It had made some kind of lodgment in their heads, and, in that sense, they did know. It is this unused and unconscious knowledge of theirs to which Christ appeals, and which He tries to draw out into consciousness and power when He says, 'You know whither I am going, and you know the road.' Is not that exactly what a patient teacher will do with some fl.u.s.tered child when he says to it: 'Take time! You know it well enough if you will only think'? So the Master says here: 'Do not be agitated and troubled in heart. Reflect, remember, overhaul your stores, and think what I have told you over and over again, and you will find that you _do_ know whither I am going, and that you _do_ know the way.'

The patient gentleness of the Master with the slowness of the scholars is beautifully exemplified here, as is also the method, which He lovingly and patiently adopts, of sending men back to consult their own consciousness as illuminated by His teaching, and to see whether there is not lying somewhere, unrecked of and unemployed in some dusty corner of their mind, a truth that only needs to be dragged out and cleaned in order to show itself for what it is, the all-sufficient light and strength for the moment's need.

The dialogue is an instance of what is true about us all, that we have in our possession truths given to us by Jesus Christ, the whole sweep and bearing of which, the whole majesty and power and illuminating capacity of which, we do not dream of yet. How much in our creeds lies dim and undeveloped! Time and circ.u.mstances and some sore agony of spirit are needed in order to make us realise the riches that we possess, and the cert.i.tudes to which our troubled spirits may cling; and the practice of far more patient, honest, profound meditation and reflection than finds favour with the average Christian man is needed, too, in order that the truths possessed may be possessed, and that we may know what we know, and understand 'the things that are given to us of G.o.d.'

In all your creeds, there are large tracts that you, in some kind of a fas.h.i.+on, do believe; and yet they have no vitality in your consciousness nor power in your lives. And the Master here does with these disciples exactly what He is trying to do day by day with us, namely, fling us back on ourselves, or rather upon His revelation in us, and get us to fathom its depths and to walk round about its magnitudes, and so to understand the things that we say we believe.

All our knowledge is ignorance. Ignorance that confesses itself to Him is in the way of becoming knowledge. His light will touch the smoke and change it into red spires of flame. If you do not know, go to Him and say, 'Lord! I do not.' An accurate understanding of where the darkness lies is the first step to the light. We are meant to carry all our inadequate and superficial realisations of His truth into His presence, that, from Him, we may gain deeper knowledge, a firmer faith, and a more joyous cert.i.tude in His inexhaustible lessons. In every article and item of the Christian faith there is a transcendent element which surpa.s.ses our present comprehension. Let us be confident that the light will break; and let us welcome the new illumination when it comes, sure that it comes from G.o.d. Be not puffed up with the conceit that you know all. Be sure of this, that, according to the good old metaphor, we are but as children on the sh.o.r.e of the great ocean, gathering a few of the sh.e.l.ls that it has washed to our feet, itself stretching boundless, and, thank G.o.d, sunlit, before us. 'Ye know the way.' 'Master, we know not the way.'

II. Observe here, in the second place, our Lord's great self-revelation which meets this unconscious knowledge.

'Jesus saith unto him: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me.' Now it is quite plain, I think, from the whole strain of the context and the purpose of these words that the main idea in them is the first--'I am the Way.' And that is made more certain because of the last words of the verse, which, summing up the force of the three preceding a.s.sertions, dwell only upon the metaphor of the Way; 'No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.' So that of these three great words, the Way, the Truth, the Life, we are to regard the second and the third as explanatory of the first.

They are not co-ordinate, but the first is the more general, and the other two show how the first comes to be true. 'I am the Way' because 'I am the Truth and the Life.'

There are no words of the Master, perhaps, to which my previous remarks are more necessary to be applied than these. We know; and yet oh! what an overplus of glory and of depth is here that we do not know and never can know. The most fragmentary and inadequate grasp of them with heart and mind will bring light to the mind and quietness and peace to the heart; but the whole meaning of them goes beyond men and angels. We can only skim the surface and seek to s.h.i.+ft back the boundaries of our knowledge a little further, and to embrace within its limits a little more of the broad land into which the words bring us. So just take a thought or two which may tend in that direction.

Note, then, as belonging to all three of these clauses that remarkable '_I am_.' We show a way, Christ _is_ it. We speak truth, Christ _is_ it. Parents impart life, which they have received, Christ _is_ Life.

He separates Himself from all men by that representation that He is not merely the communicator or the teacher or the guide, but that He Himself is, in His own personal Being, Way, Truth, Life. He said that, when Calvary was within arm's-length. What did He think about Himself, and what should we think of Him?

And then note, further, that He sets forth His unique relation to the truth as being one ground on which He is the Way to G.o.d. He _is_ the Truth in reference to the divine nature. That Truth, then, is not a mere matter of words. It is not only His speech that teaches us, but Himself that shows us G.o.d. His whole life and character, His personality, are the true representation within human conditions of the Invisible G.o.d; and when He says, 'I am the Way and the Truth,' He is saying substantially the same thing as the great prologue of this Gospel says when it calls Him the Word and the Light of men, and as Paul says when he names Him 'the Image of the Invisible G.o.d.' There is all the difference between talking about G.o.d and showing Him. Men reveal G.o.d by their words; Christ reveals Him by Himself and the facts of His life. The truest and highest representation of the divine nature that men can ever have is in the face of Jesus Christ.

I need only remind you in a sentence about other and lower applications of this great saying, which do not, as I think, enter into the purpose of the context. He is the Truth, inasmuch as, in the life and historical manifestation of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Scriptures, men find foundation truths of a moral and spiritual sort.

'Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are n.o.ble, whatsoever things are lovely and of good report,' He is these, and all true ethics is but the formulating into principles of all the facts of the life and character of Jesus Christ.

Further, my text says He is the Way because He is the Life. On the one side G.o.d is brought to all hearts, and in some real sense to our comprehension, by the life of Jesus Christ, and so He is the Way. But that is not enough. There must be an action upon us as well as an action having reference to the divine nature. G.o.d is brought to men by the manifestation in Christ; and we, the dead, are quickened by the communication of the Life. The one phrase points to all His work as a Revealer, the other points to all His work upon us as life-giving Spirit, a Quickener and an Inspirer. Dead men cannot walk a road. It is of no use to make a path if it starts from a cemetery. Christ taught that men apart from Him are dead, and that the only life that they can have by which they can be knit to G.o.d is the divine life which was in Himself, and of which He is the source and the principle for the whole world. He does not tell us here what yet is true, and what He abundantly tells in other parts of this great conversation, that the only way by which the life which He brings can be diffused and communicated is by His death. 'Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone.' He is the Life, and--paradox of mystery and yet fact which is the very heart and centre of His Gospel--His only way of giving His life to us is by giving up His physical life for us. He must die that He may be the life-spring for the world. The alabaster box must be broken if the ointment and its fragrance are to be poured out; and 'death is the gate of life' in a deeper than the ordinary sense of the saying, inasmuch as the death of the Life which is Christ is the life of the death which we are.

And so, because, on the one hand, He brings a G.o.d to our hearts that we can love and trust, and because, on the other, He communicates to our spirits, dead in the only true death which is the separation from G.o.d by sin, the life by which we are knit to G.o.d, He is the Way to the Father.

And what about people that never heard of Him, to whom that Way has been closed, to whom that Truth has never been manifested, to whom that Life has never been brought? Ah! Christ has other ways of working than through His historical manifestation, for there is no truth more plainly taught in this great fourth Gospel than this, that that Light 'lighteth every man that cometh into the world.' The eternal Word works through all the earth, in ways beyond our ken, and wherever any man has, however imperfectly, felt after and grasped the thought of a Father in the heavens, there the Word, which is the Light of men, has wrought.

But for us to whom this Book has come, for what people call in bitter irony 'Christendom,' the law of my text rigidly applies, and it is being worked out all round us to-day. 'No man cometh unto the Father but by Me.' And here we are, in this England of ours, and in our sister nations on the continent of Europe and in America, face to face as I believe with this alternative--either Jesus Christ the Revealer of G.o.d and the Life of men, or an empty Heaven. And for you, individually, it is either--take Christ for the Way, or wander in the wilderness and forget your Father. It is either--take Christ for the Truth, or be given over to the insufficiencies of mere natural, political, and intellectual truths, and the shows and illusions of time and sense. It is either--take Christ for your Life, or remain in your deadness, separate from G.o.d.

III. Lastly, we have here the disciples' ignorance and the new vision which dispels it.

'If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also, and from henceforth ye know Him, and have seen Him.' Our Lord accepts for the moment Thomas's standpoint. He supplements His former allegation of the disciples' knowledge with the admission of the ignorance which went with it as its shadow, and was only too sadly and plainly shown by their failure to discern in Him the manifestation of the Father. He has just told them that they did know what they thought they knew not; He now tells them that they did not know what they thought they knew so well, after so many years of companions.h.i.+p--even Himself. The proof that they did not is that they did not know the Father as revealed in Him, nor Him as revealing the Father. If they missed that, they missed everything; and for all they had known of His graciousness, were strangers to His truest Self. Their ignorance would turn out knowledge, if they would think, and their supposed knowledge would turn out ignorance.

The lesson for us is that the true test of the completeness and worth of our knowledge of Christ lies in its being knowledge of G.o.d the Father, brought near to us by Him. This saying puts a finger on the radical deficiency of all merely humanitarian views of Christ's person, however clearly they may see and admiringly extol the beauty of His character and the 'sweet reasonableness' of His wisdom. They all break down here, and are arraigned as so shallow and incomplete that they do not deserve to be called knowledge of Him at all. If you know anything about Jesus Christ rightly, this is what you know about Him, that in Him you see G.o.d. If you have not seen G.o.d in Him, you have not got to the heart of the mystery. The knowledge of Christ which stops with the Man and the Martyr, and the Teacher and the beautiful, gentle Brother, is knowledge so partial that even He cannot venture to call it other than ignorance. Oh! brethren, do our conceptions of Him meet this test which He Himself has laid down, and can we say that, seeing Him, we see in Him G.o.d?

And then our Lord pa.s.ses on to another thought, the new vision which at the moment was being granted to this unconscious ignorance that was pa.s.sing into conscious knowledge. 'From henceforth ye know Him and have seen Him.' We must give that 'from henceforth,' as a note of time, a somewhat liberal interpretation, and apply it to the whole series of utterances and deeds of which the words of our text are but a portion. And, if so, we come to this--it was in the wisdom, and the gentleness, and the deep truths of that upper chamber; it was in the agony and submission of Gethsemane; it was in the meek patience before the judges, and the silent acceptance of ignominy and shame; it was in the willing, loving endurance of the long hours upon the Cross, that Christ inaugurated the new stage in His revelation of G.o.d and in His life-giving to the world. And it is from thenceforth and thereby that in the man Jesus, men know and see 'the Father' as they never did before. The Cross and the Pa.s.sion of Christ are the unveiling to the world of the heart of G.o.d; and by the side of that new vision the fairest and the loftiest and the sweetest of Christ's former manifestations and utterances sink into comparative insignificance. It is the dying Christ that reveals the living G.o.d.

So, dear friends, He is your way to G.o.d. See that ye seek the Father by Him alone. He is your Truth; grapple Him to your hearts, and by patient meditation and continual faithfulness enrich yourselves with all the communicated treasures that you have already received in Him.

He is your Life; cleave to Him, that the quick Spirit that was in Him may pa.s.s into you and make you victors over all deaths, temporal and eternal. Know Him as a Friend, not as a mere historical person, or with mere head-knowledge, for to know a friend is something far deeper than to know a truth. 'Acquaint thyself with Him and be at peace.'

'This is life eternal, to know,' with the knowledge which is life and possession, 'Thee, the only true G.o.d, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.'

THE TRUE VISION OF G.o.d

'Philip saith unto Jesus, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. 9. Jesus saith unto Him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father, that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me: or else believe Me for the very works' sake.'--JOHN xiv.

8-11.

The vehement burst with which Philip interrupts the calm flow of our Lord's discourse is not the product of mere frivolity or curiosity.

One hears the ring of earnestness in it, and the yearnings of many years find voice. Philip had felt out of his depth, no doubt, in the profound teachings which our Lord had been giving, but His last words about seeing G.o.d set a familiar chord vibrating. As an Old Testament believer he knew that Moses had once led the elders of Israel up to the mount where 'they saw the G.o.d of Israel,' and that to many others had been granted sensible manifestations of the divine presence. As a disciple he longed for some similar sign to confirm his faith. As a man he was conscious of the deep need which all of us have, whether we are conscious of it or not, for something more real and tangible than an unseeable and unknowable G.o.d. The peculiarities of Philip's temperament strengthened the desire. The first appearance that he makes in the Gospels is characteristically like this his last. To all Nathanael's objections he had only the reply, 'Come and see.' And here he says: 'Oh! if we could _see_ the Father it would be enough.' He was one of the men to whom seeing is believing, and so he speaks.

His pet.i.tion is childlike in its simplicity, beautiful in its trust, n.o.ble and true in its estimate of what men need. He longs to see G.o.d.

He believes that Christ can show G.o.d; he is sure that the sight of G.o.d will satisfy the heart. These are errors, or truths, according to what is meant by 'seeing.' Philip meant a palpable manifestation, and so far he was wrong. Give the word its highest and its truest meaning, and Philip's error becomes grand truth. Our Lord gently, lovingly, and with only a hint of rebuke, answers the request, and seeks to disengage the error from the truth. His answer lies in the verses that we have read. Let us try to follow them, and, as we may, to skim their surface, for their depths are beyond us.

First of all, then, we have the sight of G.o.d in Christ as enough to answer men's longings. There is a world of sadness and tenderness, of suppressed pain and of grieved affection, in the first words of our Lord's reply. 'Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known Me, Philip?' He seldom names His disciples. When He does, there is a deep cadence of affection in the designation. This man was one of the first disciples, the little original band called by Christ Himself, and thus had been with Him all the time of His ministry, and the Master wonders with a gentle wonder that, before eyes that loved Him as much as Philip's did, His continual self-revelation had been made to so little purpose. In the answer, in its first portion, there lies the reiteration of the thoughts that I was trying to dwell upon in the last sermon, which, therefore, I may lightly touch now--viz., that the sight of Christ is the sight of G.o.d--'He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father'--and that not to know Christ as thus showing G.o.d is not to know Him at all--'Thou hast not known Me, Philip.' Further, there is the thought that the sight of G.o.d in Christ is sufficient, 'How sayest thou, Shew us the Father?' From all this we may gather some thoughts on which I lightly touch.

I. The first is, that we all do need to have G.o.d made visible to us.

The history of heathendom shows us that, in every land men have said, 'The G.o.ds have come down to us in the likeness of men.' And the highest cultivation of this highly cultivated and self-conscious twentieth century has not removed us from the same necessity that the rudest savage has, to have some kind of manifestation of the divine nature other than the dim and vague ones which are possible apart from the revelation of G.o.d in Christ. A G.o.d who is only the product of inferences from creation, or providence, or the mysteries of history, or the wonders of my own inner life, the creature of logic or of reflection, is very powerless to sway and influence men. The limitations of our faculties and the boundlessness of our hearts both cry out for a G.o.d who is nearer to us than that, and whom we can see and love and be sure of. The whole world wants the making visible of divinity as its deepest want. And _your_ heart and mind require it.

Nothing else will ever stay our hunger, will ever answer our questioning minds.

Christ meets this need. How can you make wisdom visible? How can a man see love or purity? How do I see your spirit? By the deeds of your body. And the only way by which G.o.d can ever come near enough to men to be a constant power and a constant motive in their lives is by their seeing Him at work in a Man, who amongst them is His image and revelation. Christ's whole life is the making visible of the invisible G.o.d. He is the manifestation to the world of the unseen Father.

That vision is enough--enough for mind, enough for heart, enough for will. There is none else that is sufficient, but this is. 'How sayest thou, Shew us the Father?' If we can see G.o.d it suffices us. Then the mind settles down upon the thought of Him as the basis of all being, and of all change, and the heart can twine itself round Him, and the seeking soul folds its wings and is at rest, and the troubled spirit is quiet, and the accusing conscience is silent, and the rebellious will is subdued, and the stormy pa.s.sions are quieted, and in the inner kingdom is a great peace. The sight of G.o.d in Christ brings rest to every heart, and, Oh! the absence of the vision is the true secret of all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because we see not G.o.d, our Father, in the face of Jesus. 'Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,' is either a puerile pet.i.tion, or the deepest and n.o.blest prayer of the human heart. Blessed are they who have learned what it is to see, and know where that great sight is to be seen!