Bible Commentaries
John 20

Verses 19-20

The Saviour’s Easter Greeting

When therefore it was evening, on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had said this, he shewed unto them his hands and his side.— John 20:19-20.

1. It is the evening of the first Easter Day. In an upper chamber in Jerusalem—in all probability in the upper chamber which had been the scene of the institution of the Holy Eucharist, and was to be the scene of the baptism of the Church by the descending Spirit, and then to be the place of the first of Christian assemblies, the mother of all Churches—it is in this upper chamber that we see gathered together a band of men and women. They are in a position of restlessness up to the point of fear. They feel the restlessness of men whose lives are in great danger. The tomb of the Master whom they loved was found empty. The foes of Jesus imagined that this was by the connivance of the disciples themselves. His disciples had come, they said, and stolen the body whilst the guards placed to keep watch over it slept. The disciples accordingly anticipated that that fury of the Jews which had burst with such force upon their Master would now descend upon their heads. But they were not only in this bodily fear. This bodily fear would not have been in them if they had not been restless in mind. They did not know what to believe, they were in perplexity. The tomb of Christ was empty. By a resurrection? They could not believe that. True, their Lord again and again had tried to prepare them for that mystery of His resurrection, but they could not understand it. How then was it empty? Not by any act of their own, they knew very well. And the perplexity was increased in this way—some people said He was risen; some women said they had seen Him. Were these but women’s stories after all? If they were not true, what was true? Was He risen or was He not?

Jesus came, unannounced and unexpected, into the midst of these perplexed disciples. Their very fear drew Him to them. They wanted Him: He knew it, and could not keep away. It was “the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut.” They wanted the old familiar times back again. If He would come and bring them how much more faithful they would be to Him than in the past. But He was gone, and they dare not keep the door ajar, for they had no courage and much fear. And then, lo! He was there, standing in the midst of them, with the old kind smile upon His face, and the calm strong greeting on His lips. “Peace be unto you,” He said, and showed them His hands and His side.

2. This was the greeting He would naturally have given them on any occasion on which He came to them in the days of His earthly life in the body. Those who have lived in Eastern lands seem to hear the Lord’s voice when they read His salutation, the sound of which from the lips of all visitors they know so well. But we must believe that the words “Peace be unto you” had a more than ordinary significance on this occasion. They were intended to convey a real inward comfort, and to produce, in the mind of those who heard them, the assurance that a new and blessed influence had entered into them. In the darkest hour of their earthly companionship, when the deep shadow of approaching separation was resting upon them, the Lord had said “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” Their hearts were too sad at the time to receive any comfort from the saying, sweet and soothing though the sound of the words must even then have seemed. But now, in the very first words He speaks to them after His Resurrection, He fulfils His promise, and proves to them the reality of His own gift. Then, having allayed their terror, He certifies them of His bodily identity by showing them His hands and His side. There was no longer any possibility of doubting the truth of His Resurrection, and feelings of gladness at once dispelled the former doubts and apprehensions.

For those disciples that day had been a very restless one. They had been troubled by what the women said, and by their own many questionings and thoughts. Sin came back on Peter and on others, and the very thing they needed most was that He should stand and say, “Peace be unto you; see my hands and my side.” And do we not realize that very often at the end of the day Christ comes to us, when we are troubled with a sense of sin? And those of us who are trying to live nearest the true Light are most conscious of sin and imperfection. There never was a day we ever lived in which there were not many things that came short of the glory of God, and there is never an evening in which we do not have to say, “Forgive us our debts,” our shortcomings, even if we do not need to say, “Forgive us our trespasses,” our transgressions. There is always the coming short of His glory, even if there is not voluntary transgression of His will. And so there never is a time when we do not need that He should show us His hands and His side, and say, “Beloved, there is the guarantee that your sin is put absolutely away, that there is nothing between God and you but one clear heaven of love.” 1 [Note: F. B. Meyer, in The Keswick Week (1900), 132.]

I happened to drop into a house where there was a large family, and I found the mother very busy about the room. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Oh, when the children have gone to bed I have to tidy up after them, and I make straight what they have left amiss.” And there she was, just going over all the broken fragments of the children’s work, and taking up the stitches that her little daughter had put all across the piece of work she had given the child to do. I could see quite well the big cross stitches, and how the mother was taking them up and making them good. I said to myself: Yes, that is just what Christ does. He comes into the day’s life and work, when all the mistakes have been made, and the poor sermons have been preached, and the mis-statements have been uttered, and one looks back with such a sense of infinite regret and failure, and He says: “Peace be unto you. I am going over all the mistakes to put them right, and help to make powerful that which you left impotent and useless.” 2 [Note: Ibid.]

I

The Appearance Behind Closed Doors

“When the doors were shut.”

1. Barriers are often raised unwittingly against Christ. When the disciples shut and locked the doors of the upper chamber, they never meant to bar them against Jesus. They were afraid of the Jews, and acted only in self-defence. And there are lines of conduct in common life we may pursue, and we never dream that we are raising barriers between ourselves and the highest and the best: but in the end of the day for us, as for the disciples, it will be found that we have done more than we imagined—we have closed the door unwittingly on Christ.

It is the tragedy of many a life that its doors are shut. Sometimes it is engrossment in pleasure, in business, in friendship, that bars the door against the ingress of the Saviour. All these things, lawful in themselves, and having indeed a right and necessary place in any life, may gain such an ascendancy as to become its masters, demanding all thought, all energy, all strength of life, until the man over whom they have gained control is himself behind closed doors. Sometimes it is by selfishness of joy or sorrow that the doors are closed. There is a joy which is regarded as incommunicable, or a sorrow which is regarded as unshareable, and He who is the Author of each is excluded from life by His own providences misreceived and misinterpreted. Often, too, it is with us as with these His earliest disciples, fear of the consequences of identification with Him causes the door to be tightly barred. We are afraid of the disfavour of men, and in shutting out the Jews we really shut out Jesus. But chiefly it is sin that excludes the Son of God from the life in which He seeks to be known and served. And this, too, may be of unintentional beginning. For sin at its commencement is often merely thoughtlessness. Persisted in, however, despite the correcting light which God is unceasingly shedding upon us, it becomes actually wilful—the rebellious barring of the door against the Son of God.

Every morning that we rise, every day that we go forth, our choices make us or our choices mar us. Some day a choice more momentous than usual comes. We are face to face with one of life’s great decisions. And we have not been living on high levels, and so we choose amiss, for a man’s whole life is in every choice he makes. Then the days pass, and the issues show themselves, and the choice works itself out in life and character, and a hundred glorious things are tarnished and are tainted as the result of one disastrous choice. We never meant to shut out power and purity, but they have receded into the dim distance ever since. We never thought to grow heart-weary and world-weary, but that may follow from one mismanaged choosing. Like the disciples, beset by some poor fear, unwittingly we have closed the door on Christ. 1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, 115.]

And Life with full hands came,

Austerely smiling.

I looked, marvelling at her gifts—

Fortune, much love, many beauties,

The deed fulfilled man ponders in his youth,

Gold of the heart, desire of the eyes come true!

And joyously

“ With these,” I said “with these, indeed,

What spirit could miss delight?”

And paused to dream them over.

But even then

“ Choose,” she said.

“ One gift is yours—no more,”

And bent that grave, wise smile

Upon me, waiting. 2 [Note: M. M‘Neal-Sweeney, Men of No Land, 107.]

2. He came; they knew not how; they knew only that the chamber was strongly secured against intrusion or surprise. No bolt was withdrawn; no door was opened; no breach was made in the wall of their place of assembly; there was no visible movement as from without to within, or from point to point. One moment they were, as they thought, alone; and the next, they looked, and lo! an outline, a form, a visible body and face, a solid human frame was before them, as if created out of the atmosphere which they breathed. “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.” They gazed at Him; they gazed at each other in bewilderment and terror. They supposed that they had seen a “spirit”; they were with difficulty reassured—so St. Luke’s report seems to imply—by the means which our Lord took to convince them that a body of flesh and bones was before them. At last they were glad when they saw the Lord.

Christ is inevitable, unavoidable; you cannot stop or stay Him. That is the first great lesson of the Resurrection. No one can follow the story of His life, without feeling that Christ is inevitable. It is the key to the whole record. We are swept into a movement which we realize is irresistible, and the secret of its power is the irresistible Christ. We feel this not merely because Christ exercised an extraordinary influence and became the centre of a unique attraction, but because of what He was. His words and His works alike are significant first and chiefly of what He is in Himself; they are the revelation of a Person who more and more completely wins our absolute trust. When the Cross comes into view, crowning the path up which He is moving, we follow Him, knowing that, though it seems to be inexplicable, it comes within His purpose of redemption, and He fully understands it, however blind we may be to what it means. “I lay down my life for the sheep. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.” It is all a complete unity, the one perfect whole in a world of fragments. And when we hear the “It is finished” ring out through the gloom of His death-hour, we are ready for the glory which will soon be breaking from the opened grave. And as at last we see Him coming to the disciples on Easter evening, though the doors are shut against Him, we know that always and everywhere He is and must be resistless. Always and everywhere He is the inevitable Christ.

For weal or woe, whatever walls you raise, Christ passes through them all and gets to you. There are deeds that we did long since, perhaps twenty years ago, but to this hour unexpectedly they rise and meet us. There were moments of exquisite happiness in our past, and even to-day their memory is like music. You cannot shut out the thought of intense hours: no change of years will prevent them winning through. And like the ineffaceable memory of such scenes is the presence and the beauty of the Lord. Christ is inevitable. Christ is unavoidable. Sometimes He comes through the closed door, just because all life is penetrated with Him. We talk of the Christian atmosphere we breathe, but the atmosphere is more than Christian, it is Christ. This is the Lord’s day—who then is this Lord? We may have closed the door on Him, but He is here. We cannot date one letter in the morning, but we mean that more than one thousand nine hundred years ago Christ was born. He meets us at every turn of the road, in every newspaper and in every problem. Our life is so interpenetrated with Christ Jesus that to avoid Him is an impossibility. 1 [Note: G. H. Morrison, The Unlighted Lustre, 119.]

Men who lived and fought for Napoleon have told the world how they gradually came to believe him to be resistless. He had only to appear before His troops on his white charger, and down the lines of French bayonets flashed an electric confidence which made them mighty, as soldiers had seldom been mighty before, and enabled them to carry all before them. So with “the Captain of our salvation.” In the New Testament Christ goes forth “conquering and to conquer,” and He intends His Church to live in the power of that inspiration. It is nothing to Him that doors are shut, and men are weak and helpless. You may as well try to stifle the springtide or struggle to fetter the feet of the summer morning as strive to bar out the coming of Jesus risen. You will draw a curtain over the dawn and shut down the sunrise behind the darkness before you will banish the inevitable Christ. 1 [Note: F. B. Macnutt, The Inevitable Christ, 8.]

Francis Thompson has told with marvellous beauty of imagery and breadth of expression the story of the pursuit of the soul through all its manifold experience by “the Hound of Heaven,” which will not let it escape Him.

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat and a Voice beat

More instant than the feet …

“Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me.”

So the foolish soul perseveres in flight from its Saviour, and on and on after it come those persistent feet which will not be denied. It tries to hide in strange and distant places; it rings itself in with forbidden pleasures; it lavishes its love upon tender and beautiful human affections, and still

Fear wist not to evade as love wist to pursue—

till at last the chase is ended, and the Voice is “round him like a bursting sea.”

Halts by me that footfall:

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

Ah! fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.

3. But while Christ forces Himself thus upon our attention He never compels our submission. It is always a matter of choice and will with us as to the reception He receives when He appears. For when once He has secured our ear and engaged our thought He subjects Himself to our will. The crowning pathos and tragedy of life is to close the door more closely when we have been made aware of His Presence. Its crowning glory is to open it wide that the King of Glory may come in.

A Sunday spent at Cambridge in order to preach before the University came to Creighton as a welcome break. He chose as the subject of his sermon “Liberty.” Some years before at breakfast at Lambeth Palace, he had propounded the question what was the most important object of pursuit, and had maintained amidst the friendly and animated contradiction which never failed in that circle, that liberty was the most precious possession of man. This conviction only deepened as the years passed. But he felt also increasingly the tremendous responsibility of liberty, and said that, instead of snatching at it as a prize, it would be more true to speak of the burden of liberty. In this sermon at Cambridge he said: “If we try to grasp the meaning of progress as it is shown in the history of the past, it is to be found only in the growing recognition of the dignity of man, which is another form of expressing human freedom, and is the ground of its calm.” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 320.]

II

The Message of Peace

“Peace be unto you.”

This invocation of peace, at beginning or ending of intercourse, was already ancient. In our Lord’s day it had become just as much part of the social habits of the people as the custom of saying “Good-morning” is among ourselves. All the Semitic peoples, the Syrians, the Arabians, and, as we know from the Talmud, the Jews of the Dispersion, used it as a matter of course. In earlier days, no doubt, men had invoked peace from heaven with the utmost deliberation and seriousness. In the age of the kings and prophets the phrase had still a living meaning: the speaker actually prayed for the blessing of peace on the person whom he addressed. It is a gradual process by which the real fresh language of primitive times is stiffened into the unmeaning forms of the society of a later age; but as far as this expression is concerned, the process was already complete in our Lord’s day. And yet He did not scruple to avail Himself of the conventional phrase.

But this was not merely the familiar greeting of friend to friend—though it was that—in that strange moment when two worlds met. Nor was it merely a kindly word—though it was that, too—to pacify their terror, as this apparition from another world stood silently and suddenly before them. It was a word of larger, more majestic scope. Spoken to men who had met in fear, and who looked forward to troubled days, it had a wonderful power to soothe, coming from the lips of the Lord, fresh from His victory over death. “The disciples, therefore, were glad when they saw the Lord,” glad with a great gladness which we cannot know till we have fathomed the depths of their sorrow and despair as they saw Jesus taken from His cross and laid in Joseph’s tomb. Jesus is strangely earnest about this peace. Those worn, hunted men need it; and He will not leave them till He has made them sure of it. “Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you.”

A great soul can redeem his words from triviality. He takes the most conventional expressions, the small change of ordinary courtesy, which on the lips of other men mean nothing, and in his mouth they have such heart and substance that you go on cheered and bettered by his greeting. “Peace” is one of the anointed words which hold rank in human speech by native dignity, but in Palestine it had been degraded to the level of a customary civility, with which the most indifferent acquaintances met and parted. And Jesus takes the word, humbled and impoverished, and makes such use of it that it is no longer trivial but has the force of a command for their hearts. 1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 165.]

Professor Johnston Ross relates that he once visited a furniture-dealer’s shop in West London. The man was a Jew, and, noticing that his visitor wore clerical dress, he began to talk on religious matters. After an interesting conversation the Professor mounted his bicycle, saying, “Good-bye,” when the dealer called out in Hebrew, “Peace be unto you”—using the plural form. The Professor’s curiosity was aroused, and he asked: “Why do you put it so? Is there another that you wish peace to?” “Yes,” replied the Jew, “Peace be to you and to the angel over your shoulder.”

1. The first gift that Jesus had for them was a high confidence in their cause. Without that a Christian life cannot well be lived. He does not mean that we should live by sufferance, creeping timidly under the shadow of men’s example; we are to have eyes and a conscience to know the truth, and courage to maintain it. The Christian Church has been built up by the fidelities of true men, and it gains no strength from those who have not courage to be faithful. These will come in thousands when the fashion once is set, but they bring nothing with them. They, certainly, can never be described as the city set on a hill which cannot be hid. Jesus Christ is the Lord of all the brave, and His gift is the high heart which sees its course and does not reckon odds.

Peden, the Covenanter, speaks for all right Christians when he says, “For my part, I seek no more, if He bids me go.” And in one of his sermons the refrain is this: “They sought no more than His commandment; they went and He carried them well through.” 1 [Note: W. M. Macgregor, Jesus Christ the Son of God, 173.]

2. But the deepest hurt in the life of a man is not the ill his neighbour threatens; there is a controversy behind that, a war in his own conscience, a sense that his own life is wrong, and that God and he are somehow not at one. And “Christ preached peace.” He brought forgiveness to men, the assurance of God’s forgetfulness. To the most faulty He declared the goodwill of God, assuring them of a place in His heart from which all their sin and folly have not banished them. There are powers in God to part us from our sin, so that it can never rise against us any more; and these powers are centred in the Cross of Christ, in which right was done to justice by Him who came to rescue men from what they had deserved.

Christian peace, the peace which Christ gives, the peace which He sheds abroad in the heart, is it aught else than a glorified harmony; the expelling from man’s life of all that was causing disturbance there, all that was hindering him from chiming in with the music of heaven, in which now shall mingle for ever the consenting songs of redeemed men and elect angels? 1 [Note: Archbishop Trench, in The Literary Churchman (1892), 167.]

I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. 2 [Note: Maggie Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss.]

The realization of our peace with God, which constitutes or causes peace with ourselves, presupposes the reality of that peace with God; it does not create it. The fact must precede the knowledge of the fact, it cannot result from it. The ear does not discourse sweet music, or the eye produce a pleasant picture; in each case the organ of sense embraces an already existing reality. The rule holds good in the spiritual creation. That perfect harmony of will and reason and religious emotion which we denominate peace of conscience is not the cause of the sinner’s reconciliation with an offended God, neither is it identical with it; it is the result.and product of an actual reconciliation. For the condition of our own minds is as it were the shadow and reflection of the relation in which we stand to God. So long as we are at enmity with Him, so long as we feel ourselves to be exposed to His most righteous indignation, there is strife and war and tumult in our hearts. Only out of peace with God, and the conscious realization of that peace, can flow quiet of heart and peace of conscience. 3 [Note: W. B. Jones, The Peace of God, 360.]

Perhaps no Christian, since the days of the Apostles, has illustrated the true peace of the soul, which Jesus Christ gives, so fully as the great St. Augustine. Read his “Confessions.” What a restless life his was before his conversion. His intellect was tossed on the waves of speculation, and he could grasp no reassuring truth. His heart was distracted by the ideals of false philosophy and sensuality in its various Protean forms. His conscience was profoundly stirred by conviction of sin; he was hurried along by a very tempest of passions, and there was no peace.

Then came his conversion. Jesus “rose in the soul.” There was a change, which brought peace. Tolle, lege, “Take it up and read,” were the words he heard in his agony; and he took up the scroll and read, “The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness”; and those words of St. Paul fell on the ear of his soul, and there was peace. His intellect surveys the vast realms of revelation and nature, and sees Christ—the Divine Logos—everywhere. His heart turns its undisturbed and enraptured gaze on the Eternal Beauty—all ancient and all young. His will is redirected, the problem of duty is simplified, and he does it with all his heart. His conscience is calmed, for there is no longer any sense of feud between himself and holiness of life. All is pardoned through the cleansing Blood. All becomes possible through the grace of the Redeemer, and Augustine became the greatest saint the Catholic Church has produced since the time of the great Apostle himself. 1 [Note: M. Fuller, In Terrâ Pax, 79.]

3. How did the peace of God, passing understanding, come to them that night? By the manifested presence of Him who first said, “Peace be unto you,” and then showed them His hands and His side. He came as His own supreme Evangelist, in His own utterance of “peace.” He let them see Him as His own supreme Evangel, in His finished sacrifice and that glorious sequel of it, His living Presence. So it is for ever. There is no substitute, nor ever can be, for personal relations with Christ, crucified and risen. Would we taste a “peace” which is indeed “of God”? It must be “through our Lord Jesus Christ,” as not a principle only but a Person. Faith must see His wounds; faith must hear His benediction, nothing between, resting direct on Him. Only so will our life have banished out of it the bewilderment, the misgiving, which lie at the troubled heart of half-religion.

Wilt Thou not visit me?

The plant beside me feels Thy gentle dew;

And every blade of grass I see,

From Thy deep earth its quickening moisture drew.

Wilt Thou not visit me?

Thy morning calls on me with cheering tone;

And every hill and tree

Lend but one voice, the voice of Thee alone.

Come, for I need Thy love,

More than the flower the dew, or grass the rain

Come, gently as Thy holy Dove;

And let me in Thy sight rejoice to live again.

I will not hide from them

When Thy storms come, though fierce may be their wrath

But bow with leafy stem,

And strengthened follow on Thy chosen path.

Yes, Thou wilt visit me,

Nor plant nor tree Thine eye delights so well,

As when, from sin set free,

My spirit loves with Thine in peace to dwell. 1 [Note: Jones Very.]

III

The Confirmation of the Message

“He shewed unto them his hands and his side.”

Our Lord first convinced them of His identity. The deep shadows of evening were around them; a solitary lamp, perhaps, cast a glimmer of light through the large upper room, and made the darkness visible, while they were standing in a group and eagerly discussing the news of the Eesurrection, which, first Mary Magdalene, then Peter, then the two disciples from Emmaus, had in turn brought in. And casually some one glanced aside into the darkened room, where all was vacancy; and surely the air was not seen to move—but it did move—and he looked again, and it moved again, and now a dim outline was seen. The disciple held his breath, and touched his neighbour and whispered. And they looked again, and the shadow had grown in distinctness, and others saw the shape. At length it was plainly visible to all, and it stood out in the very midst in the full proportions of a man, although a moment before they could neither see, nor feel, nor hear any one besides themselves. Well might they be filled with fear, and think that they had seen a spirit. Great need had they of hearing those soothing words, “Peace be unto you!”

And now, to show them not only that it was a true material organism, but the very body that had been crucified, He showed the ghastly gashes made in the crucifixion. Luke says, “He shewed them his hands and his feet”: those hands and feet that had always been about His Father’s business; hands that had waved away the powers of darkness; hands that had been placed on the heads of little children; hands that had broken the bread of miracle; feet that had walked the stormy waters; feet that had carried Him to the weeping sisters, and the tomb of Lazarus; feet that had climbed the mountain stair into the midnight holy of holies, where He prayed; feet that had hastened to the side of the wretched, had stood near the most forlorn; feet that took Him down to Gethsemane, and failed Him there under the load of our sorrow; feet that with weak, fainting, yet resolute steps, came out of Jerusalem, while the hands assayed to hold upon His shoulder the cruel cross—the hands and the feet that were nailed to that cross.

One time when David Livingstone was engaged in his civilizing work in Africa, he was attacked by a huge lion of the jungle. The ferocious beast grasped the hand of the missionary in his powerful jaws, and broke the bone. Livingstone was rescued by two friends who had accompanied him, but for a long time he was obliged to keep his arm in a sling. He carried the scar of the wound all his days, and when the faithful natives brought back his dead body to his native land, this scar on the arm once broken was one of the means by which the remains of the great missionary were identified by his friends.

1. He confirmed His former word of peace.—“My peace I give unto you.” He had said, and the word lived in their ears like deep irony. And now, when they sat in gloomy silence, with their sorrow, and their peril, and thoughts of the empty future making peace impossible, He comes again with His former word. It was a time when the common greeting might well have sounded like a wrong; peace—when there is no peace and cannot be! But Jesus Christ, whose words are living, calls them back from all such petulance. In its fullest latitude He meant His word, and thus made trial of their faith; for peace was there, indeed, within their reach, if only they had courage to lay hands upon it. And in our disquiet the Lord speaks to us in the same way, and we shall gain or miss the help of His presence according as we deal with the promise of His word.

2. He showed them the proofs of His victory.—His appearance was more significant than any word He spoke. He appeared to those men time after time in order that, when He had withdrawn from their sight, they might know the truth, the reality concerning Him, and know it for ever; that all doubt, all hesitation, might be gone from their minds. He showed Himself to them that they might have His image in their hearts, and send on that image into our hearts through all the ages. Just as on earth in the days of His mortality He revealed Himself, so now in the days of His resurrection power He does but reveal Himself. Is there a halo? There is none. Are there the robes of royalty? They are not mentioned. Is His advent into the room heralded by the acclaim of the archangels? No. But we are told in both records—it is the very central point of the narrative—that He showed them His hands and His feet. We are told that on the next Sabbath He saw Thomas, and He said, “See my hands; see my side.” The marks of the suffering were upon Him. His body was changed strangely. It was raised to a condition of existence entirely different from the old condition; but there was something that was not changed. “When you think how much was changed, that which was not changed is all the more significant. Instead of the halo there were the wound-prints, and it was those wound-prints that won for Him the name “My Lord and my God.”

Our Lord bought peace with His Passion. It is to the Passion that He ascribes the Peace. He comes back with the signature of that treaty of peace written in His hands and side. There did not seem to be much peace in the Passion, rather it was the breaking of the storm. The old man in the Temple looked across the sky of the Child-life to where the clouds were gathering for Him and His Mother; and on the Cross the storm broke. But the vessel, lost to sight in the storm, again appears, though with rigging torn and battered hull, creeping back to port with the dignity of a struggle that has found the goal. 1 [Note: F. E. Ridgeway, Calls to Service, 219.]

The Saviour’s Easter Greeting

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Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 80, 81.

Smith (D.), Christian Counsel, 54.

Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 107.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 245.

Thomas (J.), The Mysteries of Grace, 89.

Wilkinson (G. H.), Some Laws in God’s Spiritual Kingdom, 281.

Keswick Week, 1900, p. 131 (Meyer); 1905, p. 95 (Pierson).

Verse 21

Christ’s Mission and Ours

As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.— John 20:21.

1. It was the evening of the greatest day in history, and the little company of the disciples sat watching anxiously within locked doors. They had waited all day for Jesus, but Jesus had not come. And now it was evening, and their hopes had perhaps dwindled with the setting of the sun, when suddenly, silently—without the sound of footfall or the warning of opened door—He was there. “Jesus came and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. And when he had so said he shewed unto them his hands and his side.… Jesus therefore said to them again, Peace be unto you; as the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”

2. What an astonishing statement it is! Christ makes Himself co-ordinate with the Father. He associates in indefeasible unity “the Father “and “I.” He tacitly claims the right to do what the Father does. He makes Himself equal with God. He was either incarnate God, or He was incredible blasphemer; there is no escape from the alternative. It is in such implications that we see our Saviour’s Deity. These subtle claims of Christ are irresistible arguments for His absolute divineness.

3. Quite as astonishing are these words from another point of view. Not only does the Lord associate Himself uniquely with God, but in a wonderful way He associates Christians with Himself. What an honourable vocation He assigns to His people! He sends us as He Himself was sent. He classes His disciples with Himself. He who said “the Father—I,” says, “Me—you.” Ours is a task analogous to His. What He thus declares to His disciples He expressly declares to God the Father, in that high-priestly prayer of His: “As thou didst send me into the world, even so sent I them into the world.” This immutable word which puts such honour upon Christians Christ asseverates alike to God and to man. “What a word is this!”

4. What is the real and permanent value of that message? It reveals His conception of the meaning of our mission; it unveils before us the truth concerning the responsibility of the Church of Jesus Christ, the truth concerning the responsibility of all the Churches of Jesus Christ, the truth concerning the responsibility of every individual member thereof.

I

The Son and the Disciples

1. There is a series of remarkable utterances, found only in St. John, in which our Lord draws a parallel between the relation He bears to the Father and the relation the believer bears to Himself. In these passages our Lord asserts that He is the central and connecting link in a dual relationship the upper and lower sides of which exactly correspond to each other. What the Father is to the Son, that Christ is to him who believes in Him. And thus Jesus Christ stands midway between the Father and us, and the lines of communication between earth and heaven pass through Him. All that the Father has to communicate is first received by Him and then transmitted to us, while on the other hand He receives the love and trust and obedience of His disciples and passes it all on in turn to the Father.

(1) “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father; so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me” ( John 6:57). The whole series of utterances now under consideration is cast in this parallel form. There is something more than similarity of relationship implied in these words; they also imply that the great principle of life is an identical principle both on the upper and on the lower side of this relationship. Life is the same in us as in God; and wonderful as the thought may be, it is nevertheless true that when we believe in Christ and through Him are made partakers of spiritual life, we enter into communion with the life of God Himself. When one thinks of life in man as one thing and life in God as another, one has lost the key to the science of life. Spiritual life is not a series of isolated springs, but an ocean laving every shore.

(2) “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you” ( John 15:9). Here again we have the same passing on from the Father to the Son and from the Son to the disciple. The love of the Father to the Son is beyond human comprehension. It is frequently referred to in the Gospel narratives, but always as a sacred and mystical thing which it is almost a sacrilege to unveil to the common gaze. Christ Himself says, “Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.” But love, like life, is the same throughout the universe; the same bond that unites God and Christ unites Christ and the disciple, and the disciple and his fellow-disciple, and the heart of the humblest believer thrills with the same love that dwells in the heart of God. “I have declared unto them thy name,” says Christ, “that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them.”

(3) “I know my sheep, and am known of mine, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father” ( John 10:14-15). These two verses belong to one sentence, and must not be separated as in the Authorized Version. They are two sides of a comparison. Christ is speaking of Himself as the Good Shepherd, and of the perfect understanding there is between Him and His sheep. There is an instinctive recognition by which the sheep know the shepherd, and the shepherd knows the sheep. And our Lord declares that this reciprocal knowledge and intimacy is of the same kind as that which exists between Him and His Father.

(4) “If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love” ( John 15:10). That obedience is the true test of love is a commonplace of Christian thought; Christ has taught us this in His familiar admonition, “If ye love me keep my commandments.” But here our Lord shows us how this principle runs up into the higher sphere, and forms the basis of the love which exists between Him and God. It is a law that operates universally, in heaven as well as on earth; it is not peculiar to the sphere of earthly discipleship but rules also in the heavenly places; an ordinance whose sway is felt throughout the whole circle of being. Christ lived in the love of the Father because He always did the Father’s will; His perfect obedience was the soil out of which the flower of love grew; His oneness of will and desire with the Father formed the harmonious environment in which alone love can subsist. “I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.” And now our Lord takes that exalted experience of His—the life which He lived toward the Father—and turns it earthward, as the pattern of our relation to Him. Obedience is the royal law that binds the Father, the Son, and the disciple in one fellowship of love.

(5) “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world” ( John 17:18). Christ thus links the mission of His disciples to that which He received from the Father, and makes their work the outcome and continuation of His own. The purpose which brought Christ into the world runs through the whole service and ministry of the Church, and the work in which Christian men and women are employed to-day is a continuation of the purpose of the Incarnation. The commission which the Father placed first in the hands of Jesus Christ, Christ has handed on to His disciples, thus raising them to the position of co-workers with Himself, to share in the honour and privilege of carrying out the redeeming purpose of God.

(6) For a final instance of this special form of expression let us turn to Revelation 3:21. Though we go outside the Gospel for this passage, we do not quit the circle of St. John’s writings; nor is there any change in the person of the speaker. And the fact that these words were spoken from heaven, after our Lord’s exaltation to the right hand of God, makes it all the more significant that they should assume the same parallel form as those we have already examined, which were spoken while He was on earth. “To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.” Here we see that this twofold relationship runs right through to the end, and is completed in the final triumph and glory of Christ’s people in heaven. 1 [Note: J. T. Hamly.]

The beginning of the Gospel is to be found in the thought and love of God. We may cast our lines back as far as we can through the ages of eternity, and we shall never be able to find the point at which God’s concern for the welfare of the universe that was to be first began, and yet the Lamb of God is said to have been slain from before the foundation of the world. The sacrifice of Christ was not an afterthought on the part of the Divine Being; it was, so to speak, part of Himself, an element of His very Godhead and of His very existence. So that, if we are really to go back to what may be termed the beginning of beginnings, we shall have to search the depths of the Divine existence, and follow all the wonderful and infinite course of the Divine thinking and purpose and love. There, of course, we are lost. Our hearts can only point, as it were, towards that great solemn mystery. Explanation we have none. Special indication is entirely beyond our power. We are lost in wonder, and our wonder is lost in speechlessness.

The second beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is found in the Incarnation of God’s Son. We begin the next time at Bethlehem. We were lost when it was a mere question of unuttered and in speech unutterable love. We only begin to think and to feel and to understand in part God’s meaning, when He utters His love not in speech, but in the person, the flesh and blood of God’s dear Son. We can begin there—little children can begin at that point; our love can commence its study at the cradle of our Lord Jesus Christ. Creatures like ourselves need alphabets, beginnings, sharp lines, visibilities. We are not all pure mind; we cannot dwell upon the abstract, the unconditioned, the absolute, the infinite, in matters of this kind. We need some one to look at, to speak to, to go up to quite closely, and to hear speak the language of the love of God. This is what may be termed the second beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Where, then, are we to look for the third beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God? We look for it in the Church. As He was, so are we to be in the world. We are to be “living epistles, known and read of all men.” When men ask, “Where is Christ?” we are to show them Christianity. And when they ask, “What is Christianity?” we are to show them the Church—meanwhile, indeed, an incomplete representation of the truth, yet Jesus Christ Himself claims it, and devolves upon the Church the responsibility not only of bearing His name by exemplifying His life, but of interpreting His doctrine and living upon His love. 1 [Note: J. Parker.]

2. “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.” Mark the deep significance of that resounding “as” and “even so.” The parallel involves disparity. He is God, and we are but men. He came to atone, and we but preach His sovereign atonement. This and much more is implied in the fact that in this text two different Greek verbs are used, which are translated by the common word “send.” The sending of Jesus was a grander sending far than the sending of us. He represents God more intimately and vividly than we can ever represent Him. But if there be this disparity there is in many respects a wonderful identity between His mission in the world and ours. The tenses of the verbs in the original indicate this in a very generative manner. “As the Father hath sent me”—the tense shows that the commission is still in force—“even so send I you.” The idea is that our commission is but a continuation of His in another form. The duty of the Christian is practically equivalent to the mission of the Christ. “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”

The word “send” which He uses concerning Himself is not the same word “send” as that used concerning His disciples. He speaks of Himself as the Apostle of the Father; He says, in effect, “My Father hath delegated authority to Me,” but He never delegated authority to His disciples. The word used concerning them was simpler, and merely indicates that they are His messengers. He dispatches them under authority, but He holds the authority within His own grasp.

Thus the commission of Matthew harmonises with the declaration of John: “All authority is given unto me; go ye, therefore,” and be My messengers and preach My Gospel. Jesus has never delegated His authority either to man or to men, to synods or to conferences, or even to unions; He holds it still Himself.

This is not to degrade the office of the Church; it is to indicate the fact that He brings the Church into such union with Himself that she is to exercise His authority. She is to be the instrument through which He carries out the purposes of God. God delegated all authority to His Son; and His Son calls into living and vital union with Himself all believers, and they become the instruments through which He carries out the work of God.

And I think the same meaning is found in the words He used on another occasion, when He said, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work”; and then, presently, He brought into association with Himself all His disciples when He used the plural and said, “We must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day.”

If this be the meaning of the text, then the mission of the Church in the world is the mission of Christ. He is the Sent of the Father, still the living and present Worker; but the Church is His Body—bone of His bone, flesh of His flesh. “He that is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” And as the Church of Jesus Christ realizes her actual and vital union with Christ, she becomes the instrument through which He moves to the accomplishment of His work. 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet, and to think of different things in the same order. To be of the same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that, whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept. 2 [Note: R. L. Stevenson, Lay Morals.]

II

The Mission of Christ and Our Mission

The Mission of Jesus Christ to the world may be expressed by three great words—Revelation, Redemption, Salvation.

1. It is a mission of Revelation.

He came to declare the love of the Father’s heart. The Father entrusted to the Son the manifestation of His love. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” The love of the Father to a guilty and dying world was the substance of the Redeemer’s message. “God so loved the world,” it began. How it would have gladdened that poor prodigal in the parable if he had heard in the midst of his hunger and loneliness that his father tenderly cherished his memory still. He would not then have waited till the pangs of insatiate hunger drove him to his father’s presence, if perchance it might yet be open to him, as the only alternative with death. Had a message from the father found him and called him home again, full joyously would he have trodden the homeward path. And so God loved the world in its rebellion and misery—shameful rebellion, no doubt, and merited misery; but they were His children who were groaning in bondage, and the meaning of their anguish reached and touched His heart. And God gave His only begotten Son, that the world should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Now as the Father required for the expression of His own mind and will and love to the world, and by the very nature of the case, a sufficient and adequate image, organ, hand, word, and mediatorial ambassador; so Christ required—when He was about to return clothed in our humanity to the bosom of the Father, to the midst of the throne—a corresponding agency. We are not the direct representatives of the Invisible God, of Him who fills eternity and space with His glory; but we are sent by Christ to be the image, the messengers, the hands, the mediatorial representatives of His Divine humanity to the world in which we live. Therefore, first of all, in order to realize the grandeur of our calling, let us keep ever in mind that Christ sends us to men, that by our character, by our growing sanctification, by our holy living, by our entire walk, by our habits, our spirit, we may make Him known; He was and is the light of the world, but light itself is invisible unless reflected or refracted by the medium on or through which it vibrates. We may be able to reflect some one ray of the perfect beam of unsullied light.

I am very glad that you asked me your question. May I put it this way? The contents of the Christian revelation is the Person of the Lord Jesus. Scripture is the record of that revelation. The Church is the witness of that revelation.

In early times, amongst a rude and semi-barbarous people, the Church was greatly engaged in considering how she was to discharge her function as a witness. But this process was largely concerned with mechanism. Just as the State was striving at the same time to embody the idea of justice; the method was imperfect, but the idea existed nowhere else. Still, at the present day, the State embodies that idea imperfectly; but we do not doubt about the idea itself. So with the revelation of which the Church is the guardian. That revelation is immediate to each human soul; and the attempts to express it in the forms of outward organisation—their partial success, their conspicuous failure—only make the eternal meaning of the revelation itself clearer and more precious. 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, i. 416.]

One of the last acts of Henry Ward Beecher showed the true greatness of that great man. He was leaving Plymouth Church on the last Sabbath evening of his ministry, just as the strains of the organ were dying away, when he saw two little pauper children, who had come inside from the storm to listen to the music, startled with childish fright as he drew near, as though detected in some wrong; but the warm-hearted preacher spoke lovingly to them, and, kissing them, soothed away their fears, as he went out with them into the wintry cold and sleet, with his arms thrown around them to shelter and shield. And, doing this act of lowly love, he went home to die. 1 [Note: T. F. Lockyer, The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 121.]

2. It is a mission of Redemption.

(1) Christ came into the world to express God’s absolute hatred of sin, and to extirpate it from the heart of man, by taking upon Himself all its curse and shame, bearing these to the bitter end. He came on a sacrificial and redeeming mission, to do what no angel or man could accomplish. He came to set forth what was eternally present in the Father’s heart, to bring to a climax the expression of perfect holiness and boundless mercy, to bring righteousness and love with infinite travail and peerless joy into absolute unity, to justify by remission of sins past, present, and to come, and to prove that when men realize this awful and glorious fact, when little children can sob themselves to rest in the arms of Jesus, then full reconciliation, repentance, submission to the will of the Father supervene, and there is the beginning of a new and eternal life.

My blood so red

For thee was shed,

Come home again, come home again!

My own sweet heart, come home again!

You’ve gone astray

Out of your way—

Come home again, come home again!

(2) Now if we are sent at all, we are sent to take a share in the very ministry of our Lord Himself. Our service represents and continues His service. Our labour is indissolubly joined to His. We are actually brought into a partnership with Him who “came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.” And what a tremendous obligation does that fellowship lay upon us! We remember, with shame for ourselves, how utterly Christ gave Himself. Of Tissot’s 365 drawings of His life, no less than 310 are concerned with the ministry and Passion: and yet even that proportion is inadequate to express the place which service occupied in the life of the Great Pastor. Why, surely His every act, His every word and thought, was service. The whole of His life was one long sacrificing of Himself for others. And when there was nothing further that His life could give, He gave the life itself a willing sacrifice in death. Well might our Lord, looking into the eager faces of His Apostles, ask, “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” Well may He put to us that question now!

Scarce had she learnt to lisp the name

Of Martyr; yet she thinks it shame

Life should so long play with that breath

Which spent could buy so brave a death.

She never undertook to know

What death with love should have to do;

Nor has she e’er yet understood

Why to shew love, she should shed blood.

Yet though she cannot tell you why,

She can love, and she can die. 1 [Note: Richard Crashaw.]

3. It is a mission of Salvation.

(1) In order to save the world He began with loving care showered on little children, with sympathy extending to the outcast and excommunicate, to the publican, the harlot, the devilridden, and the dead. He healed men one by one. He felt the special agony of the widow of Nain and of the family at Bethany. He had saving words for rulers and priests, for Pilate and Caiaphas, for His executioners, and for the dying brigand.

(2) Now in all this He was sent to unveil the righteousness and love of the Father, and He sends faithful souls who have learned His secret to carry out the plan of which He sets the example, the first beginnings of which He wrought alone. When a missionary, with patience, persists in saving one drunkard, one idolater, one cannibal from his otherwise inevitable doom, pursues the proud rebel with the calls of pity, or urgently plies any one despairing soul with the great consolation; when a missionary of the cross knows that his Master’s order is, “Go, preach to every creature, compel the vile and the most ignorant, the most bewildered, to come into the light, and accept the conditions of salvation,” he shares the burden of Jesus, takes His cross upon his shoulders, and hears and accepts His commission as certainly as if it had been thundered to him from the skies, “As the Father hath sent me, even so send I you.”

Wherever I see a young man teaching the Gospel to half-a-dozen children, I recognize a living branch of the Church of Christ. 1 [Note: The Life and Letters of John Cairns, 588.]

The late Bishop Simpson relates a remarkable instance of the work of a young man in America, who started an institution for the care and improvement of poor imbecile children. Among those brought him was a little boy, five years of age, who had never made an intentional act, had never spoken a word, and had never given any look of recognition to a friend. He lay on the floor, a mass of flesh, without even ability to turn himself over. Such was the student brought to this school. The teacher made effort after effort to get the slightest recognition from his eye, or to produce the slightest voluntary movement; but in vain. Unwilling, however, to yield, he had the boy brought to his room, and he lay down beside him every day for half-an-hour, hoping that some favourable indication might occur. One day, at the end of six months of unavailing effort, he was unusually weary, and did not read. He soon discovered that the child was uneasy, and was trying to move himself a little. The thought flashed across his mind: “He misses the sound of my voice.” He brought his mouth near the child’s hands, and, after repeated efforts, the little one succeeded in placing his fingers on the teacher’s lips, as if to say, “Make that sound again.” The teacher felt that from that moment his success was assured. And, as the narrative goes on to relate, only five years after that time, the child stood on a platform, in the presence of interested spectators, and answered with ready accuracy the questions of a public examination. The patience of love had conquered. 2 [Note: T. F. Lockyer, The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 122.]

Yes, the ugly old church!—at first such a failure that Bishop Blomfield was wroth at its appearance,—though it cannot raise its head among the handsome churches of the metropolis, yet it has been the nursery of babes in Christ and the home of thousands who have reached a fuller age in Christian experience. I can say this without incurring the charge of egotism, for I am speaking of what the church had become before I knew it. The material fabric was the ugly, uninteresting building I have described. The church which was built up within it was a church of simple, honest souls, whose outlook on life had been raised to such a level that piety had discarded the temptation to be a sham, and a deep, earnest conviction of the reality of spiritual life had laid hold npon their hearts. They formed a society of true-hearted men and women who loved their Lord, and who strove, severally and unitedly, to do His will. The very atmosphere of the church and parish brought me a message which helped, while it humbled me. They were so much better than I—those devout and simple-minded souls to whom I was sent to minister. Whence had this atmosphere come? Under God, it was owing to the untiring and unique work of one man—the Rev. William Bell Mackenzie—my predecessor, and the first vicar of the church. Fidelity and fixity marked his life. He lived till he was sixty-four years of age. He had been ordained thirty-six years, and in that time he served but one curacy, St. James’, Bristol, and one incumbency, St. James’, Holloway. The thirty-two years at St. James’, Holloway, were devoted to building up his flock in faith and love—a generation’s work for the regeneration of the people. Slowly he gathered round him, not only an attached and appreciative congregation, but a band of trusty and faithful men and women, genuinely interested in the good of the parish and neighbourhood, and keenly alive to missionary responsibility. 1 [Note: W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 158.]

Christ’s Mission and Ours

Literature

Bardsley (J. W.), Illustrative Texts, 29.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, ii. (pt. ii.) 479.

Brown (J. B.), The Divine Life in Man, 309.

Coyle (R. F.), The Church and the Times, 35.

Dudden (F. Homes), Christ and Christ’s Religion, 217.

Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord, 256.

Henson (H. H.), Preaching to the Times, 174.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 246.

Knight (G. H.), Divine Upliftings, 73.

Lockyer (T. F.), The Inspirations of the Christian Life, 120.

Macfarlaud (C. S.), The Infinite Affection, 63.

Mackennal (A.), The Life of Christian Consecration, 17.

Maolaren (A.), After the Resurrection, 40.

Marten (C. H.), Plain Bible Addresses, 208.

Rainsford (M.), The Lord’s Prayer for Believers, 343.

Reynolds (H. R.), Lamps of the Temple, 82.

Young (D. T.), The Enthusiasm of God, 62.

Cambridge Review, i. No. 7 (Perowne).

Cliristian World Pulpit, xxxii. 312 (Glover); lxx. 257 (Morgan).

Church of England Pulpit, lxii. 237 (Hitchcock).

Literary Churchman, xvi. 184.

Preacher’s Magazine, xii. (1901) 352 (Hamly).

Verse 28

My Lord and My God

Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.— John 20:28.

It was a strange confession this, to be addressed by a pious Jew, who knew the meaning of his faith, to the man Christ Jesus, with whom as man he had companied, with whom he had eaten and drunk, whom he had heard speak in human words through human lips. The Jew believed in a God who had created men, who worked through them and ruled them, who was conversant with all their ways, who spoke to them and had spoken through them. But it was a God who was more immeasurably distant than imagination could bridge, whose ways were higher than men’s ways, and His thoughts than men’s thoughts, as high as the heaven is from the earth. He had spoken through men, but it is in that very consciousness of the prophets that the distance between God and man becomes most significant. It emphasizes just where man is highest; for in proportion to man’s goodness does he become conscious of his own sinfulness in the presence of the high and holy God. “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts”—that had been the cry of Isaiah. “Ah, Lord God! behold I cannot speak: for I am a child”—that had been the confession of Jeremiah’s weakness. There was not one of these holy men of God who, if we had proposed to offer him the sort of reverence that is due to God, would have hesitated for a moment to rebuke it in the language of St. Peter, “Stand up; for I myself also am a man.” The last of the prophets, he who is called greater than the prophets, is conspicuous for this self-effacement in the presence of God, though in his case he took off the glory of his prophetic crown to cast it at the feet of Christ. Truly a strange confession this, to see one who knew the meaning of his belief in the one and only unapproachable God, and hear him speak to One who was truly Son of Man, truly Jesus of Nazareth, in the words “My Lord and my God.”

1. The text forms the climax of the Fourth Gospel. It is St John’s answer to the question, “Who then is this?” That question was asked by the people when Christ stayed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. They were astonished without measure, we are told, and said one to another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

Four answers have been given to that question.

(1) First there is the answer which the people themselves gave. “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” they said. He was one of themselves. He had been born in Bethlehem; He had followed His father’s trade; He had lived amongst them, and they believed that they knew Him. They knew Him and all His kindred: “Is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?” He simply made an addition of one to the population of the town of Nazareth.

And this answer is given still. In our day there is scarcely a more popular answer than this. Jesus is a man; He makes an addition of one to the population of the world. He is a man, it is added, of supreme ability, originality, and earnestness. He is a man of most exceptional goodness. Those who make this answer have a little difficulty in agreeing as to just how good He was. Some go so far as to say that He seems to have been sinless, or at any rate that nothing sinful is reported of Him. But most will not go so far as that. They cannot believe that any man whose father and mother we know could be sinless.

In the shop of Nazareth

Pungent cedar haunts the breath.

’Tis a low Eastern room,

Windowless, touched with gloom.

Workman’s bench and simple tools

Line the walls. Chests and stools,

Yoke of ox, and shaft of plow,

Finished by the Carpenter,

Lie about the pavement now.

In the room the Craftsman stands,

Stands and reaches out His hands.

Let the shadows veil His face

If you must, and dimly trace

His workman’s tunic, girt with bands

At His waist. But His hands—

Let the light play on them;

Marks of toil lay on them.

Paint with passion and with care

Every old scar showing there

Where a tool slipped and hurt;

Show each callous; be alert

For each deep line of toil.

Show the soil

Of the pitch; and the strength

Grip of helve gives at length.

When night comes, and I turn

From my shop where I earn

Daily bread, let me see

Those hard hands—know that He

Shared my lot, every bit;

Was a man, every whit.

Could I fear such a hand

Stretched toward me? Misunderstand

Or mistrust? Doubt that He

Meets me in full sympathy?

“Carpenter! hard like Thine

Is this hand—this of mine:

I reach out, gripping Thee,

Son of man, close to me,

Close and fast, fearlessly.”

(2) The second answer is made by God. “This is my beloved Son.” The people of Nazareth claimed Him as theirs. He is one of us, they said. God’s answer is, He is not yours, He is Mine. The time may come when He will be yours also; He is not yours yet. He will be yours when you know that He is not simply an addition of one to the population of Nazareth; He will be yours when you know that He is not merely a man, but the Son of man. Meanwhile He is Mine; He is the Son of God. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.

This answer is not so popular in our day. It is not so comprehensive; it is said to be not so comforting. The great merit, we are told, of regarding Jesus as simply one of us is that we can then be sure of His sympathy. But is it enough to be sure of His sympathy? Must we not also be sure of His power? It is one thing to know that He is willing; is He also able to help us in every time of need? He who is the beloved Son of God has all the sympathy for us that the kindest-hearted man could have; and, much more than that, He is able to succour them that are tempted.

When our Lord Jesus Christ became Man, He identified Himself with humanity, in all its weakness, in all its sorrow, and (in a figure) in all its sin. An unflagging outpouring of sympathy, an untiring energy of benevolence, a continuous oblation of self-sacrifice— that was the life of the Son of Man upon earth. Many a man has borne his poverty more bravely because Jesus Himself was poor; again and again it has helped men in the furnace of temptation to think that

He knows what sore temptations mean,

For He has felt the same.

And the mourner in dark and lonely hours has found comfort in the remembrance that Jesus wept at a human grave, and knows all the bitter longings of his soul. 1 [Note: S. C. Lowry, Lent Sermons on the Passion, 55.] His question still, to every sufferer who needs relief, to every sinner who needs pardon, is, “Believest thou that I am able to do this?” And the reply still is, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

(3) The third answer is again the answer of the people—“This is indeed the Saviour of the world.” It was the answer given by those Samaritans who had discovered for themselves that Jesus could both sympathize and deliver. It was the answer of those who had had personal experience of His saving grace and power. “Now we believe,” they said to the woman of Samaria, “not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” They had taken the answer of the inhabitants of Nazareth and the answer of God the Father and had put them together. He was both the carpenter and God’s Son.

And this is the final answer. There is no possibility of going beyond it. The answer of the inhabitants of Nazareth is shortsighted and very partial. God’s answer is partial also, since it has to wait our response before it can be made complete. But it is not short-sighted. It has within it the promise, as it has the potency, of the salvation of the world. It is God’s own expression of the momentous fact of history: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” It only waits for that fact to have its fulfilment—“that whosoever believeth on him may not perish but have everlasting life.” The answer of the people of Samaria is complete and it is final. All that has yet to be done is to have its contents declared and appropriated. What does Saviour involve? And how is the Saviour of the world to be recognised as mine?

(4) Thomas declared its contents. The Saviour of the world is both Lord and God. He is Lord, for He is a man. The inhabitants of Nazareth knew that. He is also the supreme man. They did not know that; and when He claimed it they took Him to the brow of their hill to cast Him down headlong. Thomas had discovered that Jesus is Son of man, the representative Man, the Man to whom every man owes obedience. But He is also God. The people of Nazareth did not know that He was God: but God the Father knew—“This is my beloved Son.” That also was contained in the title which the Samaritans gave Him—“the Saviour of the world”—though they did not bring it out, and probably were not aware of it. Thomas brought it out, knowing as he did that no man, if he is only man, can save his brother or give to God a ransom for him.

But Thomas not only declared the contents of the Samaritans’ confession, he appropriated them. He said, “ My Lord and my God”; from which we see that he was led along a path of his own, through his own personal experience, to this appropriation.

2. Now this is the confession to which the Fourth Gospel has been leading up. St. John began with the statement that the Word was God. He showed at once that he identified the Word with Jesus of Nazareth, for he said that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. Then he proceeded with the rest of the life of Jesus, selecting his incidents in order to show that he was right in identifying Jesus with the Word. He came quite early to the people of Samaria, who said, “This is the Saviour of the world.” But that was not definite enough; it was not individual enough. He proceeded with the life, recording its wonderful words and wonderful works, till he came to the death and the resurrection of Jesus. He reached his climax and conclusion in the confession of Thomas, “My Lord and my God.” Then he brought his Gospel to an end with that frank expression of the purpose of it—“These are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.”

3. Is it not a remarkable thing that this confession was made by Thomas? We speak of Thomas as the doubter. Is it not astonishing that the doubting Thomas should have been he that rose to that great height of faith, and was able to say “My Lord and my God”? It may be that we are not so much astonished at it as our fathers were. Tennyson has taught us to believe that doubt may not be undesirable. At least he has taught us to repeat comfortably his words—

There is more faith in honest doubt,

Believe me, than in half the creeds.

But even to us it is surely a surprise to find that that man whom we have looked upon as most reluctant of all the Apostles to make the venture of faith, makes at last a venture which must, we think, have startled the rest of the Apostles as they heard it, calling this Jesus with whom they had companied all these days not only Lord but also God. But let us see if Thomas was the common doubter we have taken him for. We know very little of his history. Almost all we know from the Gospels is contained in four sayings.

(1) The first saying was uttered on the occasion of the death of Lazarus. Jesus and His disciples had left Judæa for fear of the Jews when word reached them in their seclusion that Lazarus was dead. Jesus announced His intention of returning to the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. The disciples remonstrated. “The Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again?” When Jesus persisted, “Let us also go,” said Thomas, “that we may die with him.” These are not the words of a vulgar doubter. They are the words of a man who counts the cost. If he errs in counting the cost too deliberately, at any rate he falls into fewer mistakes than the impulsive Peter. And it is the more creditable to him that, counting the cost so carefully, he makes so brave a decision as this.

(2) The second saying is spoken in the Upper Room. Jesus was trying to prepare the disciples for the impending separation. He was going away. They knew where He was going, did they not? “Whither I go ye know, and the way ye know.” But they did not know; and it was Thomas who uttered their ignorance: “Lord, we know not whither thou goest: and how can we know the way?” There is neither doubt nor conspicuous caution in the words; there is simply the mind of the practical man who is willing to go where he has to go but would like to see the way.

(3) It is from the third saying that Thomas has obtained the name of doubter. Jesus had risen from the dead, but Thomas could not believe it. No more could the rest believe it until they had evidence before them. Thomas happened to be absent when they had it, and he said, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” With such an expression of determined disbelief to his credit, it is not to be wondered at that Thomas has received the name of doubting Thomas. Yet these are scarcely the words of a man who doubts habitually. They are rather the determination of a cautious and practical man to make sure that he has evidence enough to go upon. And God never refuses any man sufficient evidence. A few days afterwards Jesus offered Thomas the very evidence that he demanded. Thomas was wrong in relying so entirely on the evidence of the senses, and he was rebuked for that. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” But it is to the glory of Thomas that when he did obtain sufficient evidence he believed with all his heart. As soon as he understood, he trusted; as soon as he knew, he loved. He needed no more than the evidence of the Resurrection to prove the Divinity. He made the great leap of faith and threw himself personally into the arms of a personal Saviour—“My Lord and my God.”

(4) “My Lord and my God.” This is the fourth saying of Thomas that we know. Thomas the doubter has left his doubt behind. He has outstripped his fellow-disciples. He has outstripped even the impetuous Peter, whose great confession,” Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God,” lacks the personal appropriation that marks the difference between insight and faith.

Men have generally passed on Thomas a very severe judgment. The Church, for ages, has branded infidel on his brow. But this judgment is one that is not justified by the facts, and cannot be entertained by us. At all times and even to this day people are quite ready to scatter such epithets about with an open hand. It is an easy and complacent way of disposing of men. But it is often a shallow enough device. We show thereby but little insight into the nature of men or of God. If we could look into the hearts of those whom we so fling away from us, we should often find deep enough sorrows there, struggles to which we ourselves are strangers, wrestlings for truth and light without receiving it, and yearnings pent up and hidden from the general eye. 1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Called of God, 322.]

There is not one believer who is not assailed by moments of doubt, of doubt of the existence of God. These doubts are not harmful: on the contrary, they lead to the highest comprehension of God. That God whom I knew became familiar to me, and I no longer believed in Him. A man believes fully in God only when He is revealed anew to him, and He is revealed to man from a new side, when He is sought with a man’s whole soul. 2 [Note: Tolstoy, Works, xvi. 418.]

They bade me cast the thing away,

They pointed to my hands all bleeding,

They listened not to all my pleading;

The thing I meant I could not say;

I knew that I should rue the day

If once I cast that thing away.

I grasped it firm, and bore the pain;

The thorny husks I stripped and scattered;

If I could reach its heart, what mattered

If other men saw not my gain,

Or even if I should be slain?

I knew the risks; I chose the pain.

O, had I cast that thing away,

I had not found what most I cherish,

A faith without which I should perish,—

The faith which, like a kernel, lay

Hid in the husks which on that day

My instinct would not throw away! 3 [Note: Helen Hunt Jackson.]

4. How did Thomas reach his great confession? He reached it through the Death and the Resurrection. These are the two events which have occurred between the time when Thomas with the rest of the disciples forsook Him and fled, and the time when he said, “My Lord and my God.”

(1) He obtained “My Lord” first. The resurrection of Jesus gave him that directly. For Jesus had claimed the mastery, and to that claim God had now set His seal by raising Him from the dead. It was the simple confession of the Messiahship. His death seemed to show that He had made the claim unwarrantably, but the resurrection proved that He had made it with the approbation of God.

The title “Lord” as used at the time, had little more significance than the title “Sir,” as we use it in addressing men to-day. But as it fell from the lips of this man, I think I am right in saying that it came with a full and rich and spacious meaning. I do not think for a moment you can differ from me when I say that when Thomas on that occasion said, “My Lord,” in that word he recognized the sovereignty of Christ over his own life, and did by that word yield himself in willing submission to that sovereignty. 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

(2) But “Lord” alone may be useless. “Ye call me Master and Lord,” said Jesus, “but ye do not the things which I say.” And again, He warned them that many would say to Him “Lord, Lord,” to whom He would have to make the reply that He never knew them. To “My Lord” it is necessary to add “My God.”

Thomas obtained “My Lord” from Jesus’ resurrection. He found “My God” in His death and resurrection combined. We are apt to think that he must have found “My God” in the power which Jesus possessed or in the authority which He wielded; in His miracles or in His teaching. But His life and work could do no more than show that Jesus might be God. What proved Him to be God indeed was His suffering and death followed by His resurrection. For now it was evident that He need not have suffered and need not have died. It was evident that He had suffered and died purely out of love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” It needs the love of God to lay down one’s life for one’s enemies. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “God is love,” and the Man who could not save Himself as He hung upon the cross could be nothing less than God.

If the conclusion that Jesus was God was based merely upon the fact of resurrection, I declare that it was not justified. Resurrection did not demonstrate deity. The Hebrew Scriptures told of resurrection of certain men from the dead. Put these out of mind if you can. Thomas had seen three dead ones come to life during the ministry of Jesus. He had seen Him raise the child of Jairus; he had seen the son of the widow of Nain given back to his mother after he had been laid upon the bier; and he had seen the raising of Lazarus, but he did not stand in the presence of Lazarus and say, My Lord and my God, because Lazarus was alive from the dead. If the confession was merely the result of resurrection, then I declare it was not justified. The fact that Christ was risen from among the dead is not enough to base the doctrine of His deity upon. But, as a sequence to all that had preceded it, I claim that he was justified. In that hour when Thomas became convinced that the One he had seen dead was alive from among the dead, there came back again to him with gathered force, focused into one clear bright hour of illumination, all the facts in the life and ministry that had preceded that resurrection. 1 [Note: G. Campbell Morgan.]

Faith is not belief in fact, demonstration, or promise; it is sensibility to the due influence of the fact, something that enables us to act upon the fact, the susceptibility to all the strength that is in the fact, so that we are controlled by it. Nobody can properly define this. All we can say is that it comes by the grace of God, and that failure to see the truth is not so lamentable as failure to be moved by it. 2 [Note: Mark Rutherford.]

My Lord and My God

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), What is Your Life? 148.

Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 95.

Benson (R. M.), The Final Passover, iv. 536.

Bernard (J. H.), From Faith to Faith, 261.

Buckland (A. R.), Words of Help, 105.

Burrows (H. W.), Parochial Sermons, iii. 122.

Davidson (A. B.), The Called of God, 319.

Davies (T.), Sermons, ii. 220.

Hodge (C.), Princeton Sermons, 370.

Hutchings (W. H.), Sermon Sketches, ii. 134.

Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 276.

Lawlor (H. J.), Thoughts on Belief and Life, 84.

Little (J. A. S.), Salt and Peace, 162s.

Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, i. 197.

Mortimer (A. G.), Jesus and the Resurrection, 184.

Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 77.

Smith (J.), Short Studies, 236.

Speer (R. E.), The Master of the Heart, 56.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxx. (1884) No. 205.

Stanford (C), From Calvary to Olivet, 157.

Telford (J.), The Story of the Upper Room, 245.

Webb (A. B.), in Sermons for the People, i. 80.

Christian World Pulpit, lvii. 257 (Gore); lxxvii. 241 (Morgan).

Church Pulpit Year Book, vii. (1910) 81.

Keswick Week, 1905, p. 95 (Pierson).

Verse 29

Believing Without Seeing

Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.— John 20:29.

1. These words of our Lord to Thomas add one more beatitude to those with which the Sermon on the Mount began. He had already taught to men the blessedness of humility, of meekness, of purity, of peace, not only in the beautiful phrases which we know so well, but chiefly by the example of His life. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.… Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.… Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called sons of God.” And now, when His earthly ministry is over, and when He is about to return to the majesty of His glory, He leaves as one parting benediction to those who love and follow Him, even to all who love and follow to the best of their powers the things that are good: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” The benediction of faith; it is one of the last messages of the Risen Lord to His Church, and it brings fresh consolation and strength from age to age in correspondence with the varying needs and perplexities of mankind.

2. What is blessedness? It is spiritual happiness. It is that deep calm of gladness which is spiritual in its origin and in its maintenance. This is the heritage of those who, not having seen, yet have believed. And it is the higher blessedness. It is contrastive. Thomas had insisted on sight as an aid to faith. The concession was granted to him. He saw the Risen One, and believing, cried in a passion of adoration, “My Lord and my God!” And he was blessed. Every one who believes is blessed. But his was not the supreme blessedness. “Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” That is the crowning blessedness. They have the noblest beatitude who have not seen, and yet have believed.

When Dr. Arnold was suddenly stricken with his mortal agony, he was seen, we are told, lying still with “his hands clasped, his lips moving, and his eyes raised upwards, as if engaged in prayer, when all at once he repeated, firmly and earnestly, ‘Jesus saith unto him, Because thou hast seen thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.’ ” 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Revelation of the Lord, 102.]

I

The Seen and the Unseen

That sense perception is at the basis of all our knowledge is one of those axioms with which we are all familiar, even though we have never read a word of philosophy. In the common language of daily life we are accustomed to assertions of assured knowledge, by a reference to the experience of one or other of our five senses. Two of them, those of sight and touch, are indeed the criteria which we apply to knowledge of all kinds. “It is evident,” or, “It is palpable,” are the two chief phrases which, through many variations, are the signs we use for certitude. If we wish to describe the illusory or doubtful, we invariably deny in some form or another that they can be seen or felt. They are imperceptible or intangible, unseen by the eye or unfelt by the hand, and as such are viewed with suspicion or rejected with incredulity. Tennyson has expressed a common conviction when he says, “Knowledge is of things we see,” and contrasts it with faith. To many the difference between faith and knowledge is the difference between the unknown and the known, and much of the agnosticism of the present day is largely due to this conception that the senses are not a means, but the only means of obtaining assured knowledge.

To certain types of mind, however, the limitations of sense perception are as remarkable as the range of their operations, and the conception of limiting knowledge to the impressions of sense, and the mind’s working on those impressions, is one which presents insuperable difficulties. They are quite conscious of the inestimable debt the mind owes to the senses, but they refuse to believe that the mind cannot pass into regions which are for ever beyond the reach of the senses, or that it cannot arrive at truth except as the object is presented to it by means of the senses. They are conscious that there is a region which is essentially metaphysical, in which the mind moves, not as it is guided or impelled by the senses, but by the laws of its own being, and that the goal at which it arrives by strict obedience to those laws is knowledge in the highest and best sense, even though inaccessible to sense perception. In some cases the goal arrived at can be tested by the senses, but whether tested or untested, the reality is the same. The discovery of the planet Neptune by the mind before it was brought within the range of telescopic vision, affords an illustration of what is here meant. It was the operation of the mind, working according to its own laws, that established the existence of Neptune, before the telescope discovered it. The mind, in fact, in this case aided the senses, instead of being aided by them. It is true that the mind was here working only on the data presented to it by the senses, but its working was based upon the assumption that a previous intelligence had been at work in the constitution of the universe, and that the working of that Mind was in harmony with the laws of our own minds. This, in fact, is scientific faith as distinct from scientific knowledge. It has been arrived at by means of sense perception, but it is none the less faith, as distinct from knowledge.

Our great advance in knowledge is due to our walking by faith as well as by sight. Experience has shown us that what is conforms to reason, and we therefore conclude that whatever conforms to reason exists, whether it has come within the range of sense perception or not. If the senses have not yet discovered it, we search for it with the belief that sooner or later we shall find it. The atomic theory prophesies the existence of elements which have never come within the range of sense perception, and recent discoveries have simply filled up the places which were vacant, and revealed what faith had already perceived. Science has shown us that what is ought to be, and it cannot escape creating the suspicion that what ought to be actually is, whether we perceive it or not. The distinction between faith and knowledge, therefore, is imperfectly described as the difference between the unknown and the known; it is more accurately described as the difference between anticipated and realized knowledge. Knowledge is not only of things we see, but of things we foresee. The mind may anticipate the senses and believe even where the senses cannot see. If this is true in the sphere of the physical, the presumption is that it is equally true in the metaphysical sphere.

1. What is the value of the evidence of the senses?

(1) The best answer is to consider what must have been the impression left upon the mind of the Jew when for the first time he saw Jesus of Nazareth, with His attendant followers, passing through the streets of Jerusalem. To answer this we must try to place ourselves in his position. Let us, for example, suppose that we were to see passing through one of our streets an excited crowd of men, women and children of the middle and lower classes. Let us imagine ourselves listening to the discordant acclamations of a multitude, many of whom we might perhaps know to be ignorant, and some to have led immoral lives. Let us dismiss from our fancy all those picturesque surroundings of eastern buildings, of palms and of flowing coloured garments, with which the magic of Christian art has invested such a scene. These representations of the past, so far as they are real, have for us of the present day a certain charm—just because of their strange and foreign aspect—which they could not have had for those whose lives were spent among such scenes. Let us eliminate from our conception of such an incident the majestic harmonies in which Christian musicians have rendered the Hosannas of the crowd. In other words, let us suppose ourselves looking at and listening to something unhallowed by those associations which of necessity give fascination to the far-off past, and let us consider ourselves face to face with the bare, unadorned, unsensational realities of the present. Let us go a step further. Let us imagine the central figure in such a scene to be one not distinguishable by his dress or, it may be, by any special form or comeliness from those about him—one whose place of birth and station in life and opportunities for education are known to us, and are not in our opinion such as to warrant us in looking for any special refinement of manner or display of learning on his part. And, lastly, let us suppose that all we have ourselves heard of his teaching has led us to regard that teaching as, to say the least of it, an innovation on the divinely-given statutes of the past. Let us try then to put ourselves in the position of the Jew of our Lord’s time, and we must, in all fairness, confess that there was much in his special surroundings that was not favourable to a ready belief in the Divine mission of the Galilean peasant.

(2) And yet the evidence of the senses has its value, and it is no light one. The change that came over the Apostles after the Resurrection has an ever accumulating force, ceaselessly advancing. As we read the Epistles, does it not strike us that the writers are living in what the world may count a dream, but is to us the opening of a new view of human life, a realization of what prophecy had foretold? They who went about the world preaching the Gospel to every creature, having given up everything that the world counts dear, facing danger of every sort, tempests, cold and hunger, prisons and suffering, and death, did they not show an intense conviction, such a conviction as has never in the world’s history been surpassed, and a conviction lasting for long, long years, showing itself in their every act and deed? Now this conviction rests on what they had seen.

The evidence of things seen is always evidence. I was asked this question in the city a few days ago: There stands the Cross on the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral. How did it get there? It is a question you had better ask your sceptical friend next time he argues with you. I would far rather have to uphold the position in a free debate that the reason why that Cross, the old gallows—and it was nothing more than the old gallows—is brandished in triumph over the biggest city in the world was because the Person who died on it rose again than have to defend any other explanation in the world, for, as a matter of fact, there is no other explanation. Why did a body of Jews, the most conservative race in the world, change their sacred day from Saturday—not to Friday—oh no, not to Friday—but to Sunday? There is no explanation, except that the Person who died on the Friday rose on the Sunday. Why did a body which called themselves “The Christians” celebrate for nearly two thousand years in their Eucharist, which is their thanksgiving service, the tokens of a shameful death—“body broken, blood shed”? There never has been any explanation except that something happened so glorious, so transfiguring, that it changed the shameful death into a badge of glory. 1 [Note: Bishop A. F. W. Ingram, Secrets of Strength, 57.]

(3) But the evidence of the seen goes only a certain way. For what is sense but the medium through which we converse with this visible and lower world, with its phenomena, its motions, its operations, and its changes? The sphere and ken of sense is scanty and limited; it reaches only to the outer surface, beyond which sense cannot penetrate. Sense needs the reason to be its interpreter and guide; for, with all its confidence, sense is blind. Without the higher light of reason, the laws, principles, causes, and conditions of all it sees, handles, and knows, are unknown. And yet the reason in its sphere is bounded too. A world of intellectual objects, the phenomena of a higher but not the highest sphere, are within its ken. The unseen and the Eternal are beyond its gaze: and of these, except by another faculty higher than sense or reason, supernatural in its substance and its acts, which comes in to perfect both, we know nothing. It is not by sense or by reason, but by faith, elevating both, that the truths of the Kingdom of God are known and believed.

There is no slight amount of peril in matters of religion in demanding more evidence than can actually be given. Men formerly used to say, “Write the Gospel—the Divine message—in letters of fire along the sky, and I will believe.” They say now, “Give me mathematical demonstration—make the whole thing as plain as a problem in geometry—and then it will be impossible for me to withhold my assent.” But this has to be considered, that we have hardly the right to require the Creator to give us the amount of evidence that we think fit to ask for. What He will do in this way, is surely for Him and not for us to settle. And if He should give, as He does, sufficient evidence to make unbelief inexcusable—sufficient evidence to enable us to believe, if we are not determined to disbelieve—I do not see what we have to complain of. 2 [Note: G. Calthrop, In Christ, 213.]

To a man who wrote to him saying that he was dying of an incurable disease, and could not accept the Christian faith, Bishop Creighton replied: “There can be no convincing proof of anything that affects our inner character. What ‘convincing proof’ have you that your wife loves you or your child? Yet you believe it, and that belief is more real to you than anything that you know or can prove. Religion must be a matter of belief, not of proof. It depends on a consciousness of the relation between our soul and God. Immortality depends on the knowledge of the meaning of our soul’s life which we obtain from looking at it in the light of God. The more we find our soul, the more readily do we see God in the person of Jesus Christ. Look back upon your own life, your growth, the traces of Providence, the presence of God’s love. Do you think that all this wonderful process can come to an abrupt end?” 1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 253.]

(4) The evidence of sense is not always applicable. Religion is not a proposition to be proved like a problem in Euclid. As to mathematical demonstration, the subject, in the nature of things, is not capable of it. Were it a matter for the head alone it would be different; but the heart is concerned in the matter. You have the two factors—the head and the heart—to deal with; and in the case of religion, there is no possibility of so binding the heart down, by any conceivable process whatever, that it should not be capable of resistance if it should choose to resist.

The following is from the pen of a well-known London physician and scientist of the present day, one who for many years was a Catholic:—“What men of science ‘want’ in order to believe in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ is this. In one word, it is proof, or evidence—what we can prove by experiment, inductive reasoning, and verification that we know. As Bithell says, ‘The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification, therefore he nurses no illusions, does not say he knows when he does not and cannot know and follow the evidence whithersoever it leads him.’ If I had been St. Thomas I should have wanted (1) the death-certificate of a medical man who had watched the case to the end; (2) proof that the doors were not only ‘shut,’ but locked and bolted on the inside; and (3) I should have carefully examined the wound in the side to ascertain whether heart, lungs, liver, or any other vital organ had been perforated, and whether what I saw was an apparition, or a spirit, or a body with ‘flesh and bones,’ and if the latter, I should have said, ‘This was never a dead body.’ It is seriously doubted by some writers whether either Lazarus or Christ was really dead, and some believe that, in the case of Christ, restoratives were administered by the women in the sepulchre. There is no evidence that would satisfy a lawyer or scientist either (1) that Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, or (2) that Jesus Christ Himself rose from the dead, and that afterwards His crucified body, with its wounds, entered a room the doors of which were shut.” 1 [Note: M. Fuller, In Terrâ Pax, 94.]

2. After all that the senses can do there remains the unseen, and faith must make its venture. All the greatest works of man have been works of faith; and those who have had most insight, and have followed the guidance of that insight till it led them to great truths, are the men who have taken the leading part in the history of our race. It is faith that incites the soldier and sailor to noble acts, faith in their commander. Perhaps the grandest discovery made by man was the opening of a vast continent; and it was faith that led Columbus across the untried and unknown seas. This is the natural view of faith, and St. Paul, tracing the history of the saints of old, marks how the animating principle of life to them was faith. And what led God to choose the Israelites as the nation through which He would reveal Himself to the world was the readiness of their faith, their adherence to the promises and their continued trust, through all the ages of countless trials—the long years of their waiting, ever filled with the “great cloud of witnesses,” who without seeing yet believed, into whose possessions we have entered, as the children of a higher faith, and disciples who have learnt at the feet of a greater Master—of the ever-growing host of which it may be truly said in the words of the text, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

From the soft south the constant bird comes back,

Faith-led, to find the welcome of the Spring

In the old boughs whereto she used to cling,

Before she sought the unknown southward track:

Above the Winter and the storm-cloud’s wrack

She hears the prophecy of days that bring

The Summer’s pride, and plumes her homeward wing

To seek again the joys that exiles lack.

Shall I of little faith, less brave than she,

Set forth unwillingly my goal to find,

Go home from exile with reluctant mind,

Distrust the steadfast stars I cannot see,

And doubt the heavens because my eyes are blind?

Nay! Give me faith, like wings, to soar to Thee! 2 [Note: Louise Chandler Moulton.]

II

Faith in the Unseen

Faith in the unseen is not an abrupt experience, unconnected with the experience of the senses. It is true that morality and religion cannot be treated in the same way as the physical sciences. They have their own data, which are not material but spiritual. If they are realities, however, they must be intelligible; they must follow similar laws to those which reign in the material realm, or at any rate they must follow law, and not be the result of chance. In the sphere of morals the good must be the reasonable; actions must be justifiable. In the sphere of religion, beliefs must be reasonable; the data upon which they are founded must be consistent with the working of the Divine mind, as that is already known to us in other spheres.

1. Faith in the unseen is belief in more than we can see.—It is quite true that “faith cometh by hearing.” Faith, that is to say, is the proper correlative of testimony. But the evidence of testimony is not sufficient to command assent, even in the affairs of this world, unless the mind brings something of its own to co-operate with it. In belief it is at least approximately true, that “we receive but what we give.” The element which the mind contributes to the formation of religious belief must be sought for in the depths of our moral being. Faith, then, may be described as the product of the outward evidence on which it rests, and the inward conditions which dispose us to admit it. It follows that if the product be constant, the two factors will vary in an inverse ratio; or, in other words, that the moral element requisite to produce religious conviction must be at least strong enough to supply the deficiencies in the external evidence.

“Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed.” So spake our Lord. What, then, did Thomas believe? He believed much more than he saw. Had he merely believed in the resurrection, there would have been no blessing attaching to such faith. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” It is the vision whereby faith contemplates the unseen that is the real source of blessing. When St. Thomas heard the words which showed how Jesus had all along been reading his heart, he at once accepted the fulness of the Divine truth. He exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”

St. John illustrates this higher condition of mind that believes without seeing. When he came to the grave of Jesus, whither Mary Magdalene had summoned him and Peter, “he saw and believed.” Apparently all that he saw was the empty sepulchre, and the place where the dead body had lain. No vision of angels greeted him, nor did the Lord of death appear. A form rose up before him, as he looked, but it was the Lord of life with the light around Him of the days that had gone. The empty sepulchre could have told him little, but Jesus coming thither through the years told him much. Words that had bewildered found their explanation now. The enigma of the life and death found their solution at last. Not thus could he have seen, had not the habits of his mind prepared him. Candid, gracious, pure, truth-loving, sympathetic with the Divine purpose, free from prejudices and open-minded, the perceptive capacity was able to take the place of sight. And so thought, reflection, reasoning, imagination, all blended in a process at once mental and spiritual, by which, as by a higher vision, he saw what the eye could not see, yet not less clearly and distinctly.

His work [ The Grammar of Assent ] included an analysis of the mind of believer and unbeliever and of the differences between them. He drew attention to the subtle personal appreciation, on the part of the religious mind, which made it find so much more evidence for Christianity in the acknowledged facts of its history than the irreligious mind could see. The general outcome of this portion of the book was to show the important place held by antecedent conditions among the reasons convincing the believer. And among these conditions were the experiences and action of the individual mind. The religious mind instinctively and by degrees accumulated evidences of which the irreligious mind—reasoning on different principles—remained wholly or partially unaware. The action of the will and of moral dispositions was gradual. Moral defect must in the long run lead the mind to miss the deepest grounds of belief. But this was something very different from insincerity. To quote a sentence written by Newman on the subject to the present writer, “The religious mind sees much which is invisible to the irreligious mind. They have not the same evidence before them.”

Newman did not deny that one reasoned rightly, the other wrongly. He did not deny that there might be responsibility for the false principles which led to unbelief—for the failure of the unbeliever to recognize the deeper principles which a Christian thinker adopts (as he phrased it a little later) “under the happy guidance of the moral sense.” But he did away with the old contrast to which Protestants as well as Catholics had long been accustomed, between believer and unbeliever as men looking at and apprehending precisely the same evidence, which was so obviously cogent that only a man whose will was here and now perverse could disbelieve. He substituted a far subtler analysis in which circumstances and education played their part in the power of mental vision on the particular subject: in which the appreciation of reasons was personal, and gradual; religious earnestness aud true principles being necessary not only to the acceptance of the reasoning for Christianity, but to its adequate apprehension. 1 [Note: Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, ii. 247.]

One must have King-recognizing eyes

To recognize the King in mean disguise. 2 [Note: Jalaluddin Rumi, in A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom , 19.]

My soul, do not pray for too little. Do not imagine that mere things will make thee blessed. No outward contact with any visible beauty would satisfy thee for an hour. The unseen alone will content thee. The things that belong unto thy peace are not worlds of space. They perish but thou remainest, they all wax old as a garment, and as a vesture shall they be folded up, but thou art the same. Ask that which is invisible, eternal, commensurate with thyself—love, sacrificial love, love even for the loveless. Ask the pain of beholding pain, the joy of seeing joy, the hope of bringing hope. That is to touch the print of the nails, for that is to bear in the spirit the marks of the Lord Jesus. 3 [Note: G. Matheson, My Aspirations.]

2. Faith in the unseen is believing what we have never seen at all.—“Now faith is the substance (the assurance, R.V.) of things hoped for, the evidence (proving, R.V.) of things not seen.” That is to say, it is the faculty which reaches to that which is beyond the sense, yet which apprehends it as certain—as being as certain as the things which we see.

Men have never seen God. The astronomer said, “I have swept the heavens with my telescope, and I have not found God.” He looked for God as for a star, and could not find Him. A voice spoke from those heavens which the astronomer did not hear, and it said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” And thousands upon thousands of trustful souls who would never look for God through a telescope have found Him with their hearts, and they face the fight of life every day bravely, knowing that He goes down to the battle with them; they lie down to rest at night feeling there is One who neither slumbers nor sleeps; if they are out in the raging tempest they sing, “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms”; if they go through places of danger and terror they hear a voice say, “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee”; and while the learned astronomer says he cannot find God, these simple souls say, “’Tis blessed to believe.”

One of the most interesting and romantic discoveries of last century in the realm of astronomy was the detection of the planet Neptune, the outermost of those “wanderers” which circle round the sun. Until the year 1846 the furthest planet known was Uranus, discovered by Sir William Herschel some fifty years before this date. Study of the movements of Uranus showed variations from the path which, on the known data, it ought to follow; and these variations could not be accounted for by the attraction of any of the inner planets upon its mass. Two astronomers, one in England, and one in France, began almost simultaneously to investigate the problem presented by its perturbations. By long and arduous calculations involving profound mathematical research, they found that the facts presented by the variations of the known planet could be explained by the presence of an unseen neighbour beyond it, of a certain mass and following a particular path. They knew that nothing else could account for the phenomena with which they had to deal. Although they had not seen another planet in the telescope or demonstrated its existence beyond doubt until their researches were confirmed: yet they believed in its existence. They saw it “as Columbus saw America from the shores of Spain.” They “felt its movements trembling along the far-reaching line of their analysis.” And when they finished their calculations and indicated the spot in the heavens where the new member of the system would be found, the observers pointed their telescopes to the skies: and at the very place foretold the “new planet swam into their ken.” 1 [Note: See Ball, The Story of the Heavens, ch. xv.]

We have none of us seen Christ in the flesh. At times we judge ourselves disadvantaged thereby. But no! Christ says we are supremely advantaged. We are blessed with a distinctive blessedness. We have really lost nothing by not being alive when Christ was incarnate here. Oh, how we should like to have seen Him! If we could have basked in His smile, or heard His voice, or even felt the rustle of His seamless robe as He flitted past us on the highway! Had we seen we would indeed have believed! Ah! so we reason. But it is a meaner faith which is so inspired. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” What is true of believing Christ is true concerning all the spiritual objects of faith. God. The heavenly home. Any spiritual truth. The quality which draws down beatitude is a faith which is independent of materialistic props. 1 [Note: D. T. Young, The Crimson Book, 55.]

Faith is—not sight,

It boasts not of the sun at noonday bright,

While groping in the starlight haze of night.

Nor Dogma proud,

Fierce vaunting of all Truth in accents loud,

Beguiling with bold words th’ unthinking crowd.

Nor Science known,

Seated in queenly rubes upon her throne,

Meting the boundless with her clasped zone.

Nor Certainty,

The overweening claim that Truth must be

What we forecast from what we hear and see.

Faith does but muse

With heed upon the data she must use,

Nor Likelihood’s fair claim durst she refuse.

Faith does but think

That walking on the Infinite’s dread brink,

She dare not mete its chain by one small link.

Faith does but feel

That what she deems all dimly, may be real,

On her blind guess she will not set Truth’s seal.

Faith doth but hope

She shall see clear—whereas she doth but grope—

When earth’s dark vistas widen to heaven’s scope.

She doth but will

The healthful impulses she would instil

May, by heaven’s prospering, all good fulfil.

She can but trust

Her wistful craving for the True and Just,

Not only may be realized but must. 1 [Note: John Owen.]

3. Faith may even be believing that which seems contrary to sense.—For there is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal and the spirit which we believe we specially derive from God. These two are opposed one to the other. And that in us which says, “This must be so, this shall be so!” is a higher faculty than that which says, “ How is this so? Why is this so?” and the act of faith on which our morality, our religion, our higher forms of being and living rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one of these above the other.

No help in all the stranger-land,

O fainting heart, O failing hand?

There’s a morning and a noon,

And evening cometh soon.

The way is endless, friendless? No;

God sitteth high to see below,

There’s a morning and a noon,

And the evening cometh soon.

Look yonder on the purpling west

Ere long the glory and the rest.

There’s a morning and a noon,

And the evening cometh soon. 2 [Note: J. V. Cheney.]

III

The Blessedness of Faith in the Unseen

Our Lord does not tell us why they are blessed who believe without seeing. He simply says they are blessed. This makes a marked difference between this blessing and those others which form the preface to the Sermon on the Mount. There in each case reasons are given; a specific reward is spoken of as bestowed upon each grace. The merciful are blessed, for they shall obtain mercy. The pure in heart are blessed, for theirs is the Vision of God, the All Holy and Pure. The peacemakers are blessed, for they shall be called the sons of God, who is the true Author of peace. The meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth; what has been called “the harvest of a quiet eye” is theirs; it is a reward that no man can take from them. And so on all through. But no special reward of faith is spoken of in the text. It is not said that the faithful and trusting soul is blessed, for it shall receive the consolations of hope and of assurance. We might, indeed, have expected that our Lord would have given us some such promise. The Psalmist had sung of the blessings of trust with no uncertain voice: “Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the Lord; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.” More than one of the beatitudes take up the words of the Psalms, and fill them with a larger and a more gracious meaning; but there is no exact counterpart in the words of our Lord for the words of the Psalmist about faith. The blessing of faith in the New Testament is something higher than the temporal prosperity of which the pious Hebrew poet spoke as the lot of the faithful and the just; it is rather that abiding and deepening sense of God’s mercy and truth for which we daily pray. “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Faith is its own reward; and the law of faith is this: “Whosoever hath, to him shall be given.”

But it is possible to suggest certain advantages which belief without sight confers.

1. It gives us the assurance of a Risen Christ.

Forty years ago a poet of genius, a man to whom this story of St. Thomas must, I think, have been almost as dear as it was to his great master, Dr. Arnold, conceives of a sudden awakening to the new and authentic tidings, “Christ is not risen.” He speaks in lofty but kindly pity to the sad dupes of the now discredited faith; to the poor women who wept beside His tomb; to the daughters of Jerusalem who wept as they saw Him pass to His Cross; to the simple men of Galilee who had stood gazing up into heaven as they fancied He ascended, and are now bidden to return to their boats and their nets; to humble and holy men of heart in ages yet to be who have surrendered their souls to a gracious-seeming lie:

Eat, drink, and die, for we are souls bereaved:

Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope

We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,

And most beliefless, that had most believed.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,

As of the unjust, also of the just—

Yea of that Just One too!

It is the one sad Gospel that is true,

Christ is not risen!

This vision of the poet, awful as it is to a serious Christian, may set us all thinking to some purpose. It may lead us to commune with our hearts in our chamber, and be still. Let us probe our hearts, even if it pain us, with the question, What is the difference to me and to my friends or my children whether the Creed of Christendom is true or baseless; whether the morning greeting of Easter Day is, as throughout the vast Russian Empire, “Christ is Risen,” or “Christ is not risen”; whether Jesus is or is not the Christ; whether the death on the Cross was the unjust execution of a good man or the sacrifice of the Incarnate God; whether the cry “It is finished” was His last, as it was certainly His dying word; whether, if He now speaks to us, He speaks, like any other of the departed, by His example and by His genius, or, with a claim which would be blasphemy if it were put forward by any other, speaks as a living King to the world, to the Church, and to each believing soul, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore.” 1 [Note: H. M. Butler, University and Other Sermons, 51.]

2. It gives us the enjoyment of a living present Christ. For He has not, as some affect to think, left His people in this world of peril and trial, and taken His seat on the throne of His Father above, there enjoying a peerless but solitary glory—blessed in the full enjoyment of all heaven’s honours and glory, but little concerned as to the happiness of His followers on earth. Far from it. His parting words are “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the ages.” So He is ever in the midst of His Church, and with His own in this world. He walks in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks and holds their ministry in His right hand. He is the light, power, and healing virtue of the gospel. He enters with His people into all their trials and tribulations. He so overrules the divergent affairs of their lot, that all things work together for their good. He has been lifted up on the cross and to the sky, that He might attract all men unto Him. He is the great moral and spiritual magnet drawing the world of mankind from the serving of sin to yield to the power of grace. And as the magnet converts those bodies on which it lays hold into magnets, which in turn draw others, so does Christ magnetize men that they in turn may transform others, imparting to them like power. So by a power extending beyond the range of His actual presence and visibility we receive blessing from Christ, though we see Him not.

Here, then, lies the central lesson of this revelation of the Risen Lord, the revelation of His spiritual presence, the revelation of man’s spiritual sight. The truest, serenest, happiest faith is within our reach. We have not lost more than we have gained by the removal of the events of the Gospel history far from our own times. The last beatitude of the Gospel is the special endowment of the later Church. The testimony of sense given to the Apostles, like the testimony of word given to us, is but the starting-point of faith. The substance of faith is not a fact which we cannot explain away, or a conclusion which we cannot escape, but the personal apprehension of a living, loving Friend. And Christ still makes Himself known in His Church and in each believer’s heart by words of peace. He is still with us the same as eighteen hundred years ago, unchanged and unchangeable, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

A manifold enjoyment of Christ is a large component of this blessedness. The believer draws such pure delight from the Lord in whom he trusts. How grandly St. Peter states it: “Whom having not seen ye love.” The loving of Christ is such unalloyed pleasure. None can know the rapture save only they who experience it. “In whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice” And how splendid the quality of the joy; “with joy unspeakable and full of glory.” Joy in Christ! Joy that cannot be spoken! Joy shot through with glory! Is not this blessedness? The so-inclusive enjoyment of Christ is a rich element in the believer’s blessedness. 1 [Note: D. T. Young, The Crimson Book, 63.]

3. It gives us the light and power of the Holy Spirit. We have not only an outward testimony; we have an inward witness beyond all that was ever bestowed on man before the day of Pentecost—the full illumination of the Kingdom of God. Before the ascension of our Divine Lord, we read that even Apostles knew not the Scriptures. Cleophas and his fellow “hoped that it was he which should redeem Israel”; and the eleven, at the hour of His ascension, asked, “Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” They knew Christ after the flesh, and their faith was as yet obscure. Therefore our Lord said to them, “It is expedient for you that I go away”; for you the withdrawal of My visible presence is needful. “For if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you; and when he is come, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance.” “The spirit of truth shall be with you and in you” for ever. And on the day of Pentecost the Holy Ghost fell upon them, and His illumination filled their inmost soul: their whole intelligence was enlightened, a fountain of light sprang up from within, and truths already known were unfolded with new and deeper meanings. They saw the full mystery of the Kingdom of God, of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; of the love of the Father in the gift of His Son, of the Son in giving Himself to be made man to suffer and to die; of the Holy Ghost, who was already upon them and within them. They perceived that their Divine Master had ascended to sit down upon His Father’s throne, crowned with power, to possess His Kingdom; and the whole earth to them was lightened with His glory.

“Where is your God?” they say;—

Answer them, Lord most Holy!

Reveal Thy secret way

Of visiting the lowly:

Not wrapped in moving cloud,

Or nightly-resting fire;

But veiled within the shroud

Of silent high desire.

Come not in flashing storm,

Or bursting frown of thunder:

Come in the viewless form

Of wakening love and wonder;—

Of duty grown divine,

The restless spirit, still;

Of sorrows taught to shine

As shadows of Thy will.

O God! the pure alone,—

E’en in their deep confessing,—

Can see Thee as their own,

And find the perfect blessing:

Yet to each waiting soul

Speak in Thy still small voice,

Till broken love’s made whole,

And saddened hearts rejoice. 1 [Note: James Martineau.]

4. It transfigures our character. The sense of transfigured character goes far to constitute this blessedness. He who believes thereby gains the secret of holiness. Faith is evermore the root of noble character. The man who believes becomes. His nature, already regenerated, is eternally being “changed from glory to glory.” Is not this a large portion of Christian blessedness? Belief in manifested God secures Godlikeness.

All faith is incomplete that is the confession of our want of knowledge and our need for help, but the most complete faith is that which lifts the whole nature, vibrates the whole man, which is felt at heart, and shown in action. When faith begins with the easy acceptance of some statements, or from admitting certain arguments, there is danger that it ends there; but when one is guided upwards by a wish for higher life and help, when the spirit is crying out for a living God, and when the yearning is so strong that we are willing to dispense with proof, and to reach out our inward hand humbly to take a gift from God, there is very little danger that any part of our life shall escape from our religion. We cannot take the mind and leave the heart in sin, nor can we take these two and leave the conduct of our daily life; and that complete sacrifice is what has value before God.

Those Christians are blessed who need to leave their simple views of childhood’s faith no more than the field-lark does her nest—rising right over it to look at God’s morning sun, and His wide, beautiful world, singing a clear, happy song, and then sinking straight down again to their heart’s home. But those are not less blessed who, like the dove, lose their ark for a while, and return to it, having found no rest for the sole of their foot save there. They have a deeper experience within, and carry a higher and wider message to the world. The olive leaf in the mouth, plucked from the passing flood, is more than the song at coming daylight. It is as Paul’s “Thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory,” compared with the children’s “Hosanna.” 1 [Note: John Ker, Thoughts for Heart and Life, 24.]

What, after all, is this “faith” which above all things we who have even a grain of it must desire to hold forth to others? “This is the victory which overcometh the world, even our faith.” It is a power, not a mere belief; and power can be shown only in action, only in overcoming resistance. Power that shall lift us one by one above temptations, above cares, above selfishness; power that shall make all things new, and subdue all things unto itself; power by which loss is transmuted into gain, tribulation into rejoicing, death itself into the gate of everlasting life;—is not this the true meaning of faith? 2 [Note: Caroline Emelia Stephen.]

Yes, Master, when Thou comest Thou shalt find

A little faith on earth, if I am here!

Thou know’st how oft I turn to Thee my mind,

How sad I wait until Thy face appear!

Hast Thou not ploughed my thorny ground full sore,

And from it gathered many stones and sherds?

Plough, plough and harrow till it needs no more—

Then sow Thy mustard-seeds, and send Thy birds.

I love Thee, Lord; and if I yield to fears,

Nor trust with triumph that pale doubt defies,

Remember, Lord, ’tis nigh two thousand years,

And I have never seen Thee with mine eyes!

And when I lift them from the wondrous tale,

See, all about me hath so strange a show!

Is that Thy river running down the vale?

Is that Thy wind that through the pines doth blow?

Could’st Thou right verily appear again,

The same who walked the paths of Palestine,

And here in England teach Thy trusting men

In church and field and house, with word and sign?

Here are but lilies, sparrows, and the rest!

My hands on some dear proof would light and stay!

But my heart sees John leaning on Thy breast,

And sends them forth to do what Thou doth say. 1 [Note: George MacDonald.]

Believing Without Seeing

Literature

Bernard (J. H.), Via Domini, 165.

Bramston (J. T.), Fratribus, 104.

Butler (H. M.), University Sermons, 43.

Calthrop (G.), In Christ, 205.

Carpenter (W. B.), The Son of Man among the Sont of Men, 117.

Carter (T. T.), The Spirit of Watchfulness, 111.

Gibbon (J. M.), Evangelical Heterodoxy, 106.

Hardy (E. J.), Doubt and Faith, 104.

Henson (H. H.), The Value of the Bible, 182.

Hoare (E.), Fruitful or Fruitless, 110.

Ingram (A. F. W.), Secrets of Strength, 52.

Jeffrey (J.), The Personal Ministry of the Son of Man, 276.

Jones (W. B.), The Peace of God, 138.

Little (J.), The Day-Spring, 146.

Macnutt (F. B.), The Inevitable Christ, 35.

Magee (W. C.), Growth in Grace, 107.

Manning (H. E.), Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects, i. 197.

Martyn (H. J.), For Christ and the Truth, 128.

Pearse (M. G.), The Gentleness of Jesus, 77.

Ryle (H. E.), On the Church of England, 125.

Stanford (C.), From Calvary to Olivet, 157.

Stone (D.), The Discipline of Faith, 131.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), ii. (1862) No. 337; New Ser. xiii. (1876) No. 1001.

Williams (T. R.), Belief and Life, 99.

Wright (D.), Waiting for the Light, 34.

Young (D. T.), The Crimson Book, 53.

Christian World Pulpit, xxviii. 180 (Frankland); lii. 52 (Gore), 307 (Barton); lv. 230 (MacEwen); lix. 243 (Scott Holland); lxii. 428 (Henson); lxvi. 262 (M‘Murtrie); lxix. 102 (Mackintosh), 140 (Lyttelton).

Church of England Pulpit, lvii. 218 (Inge).

Church Pulpit Year Book, ix. (1912) 82.

Verse 31

The Chief Purpose of the Gospel

Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye may have life in his name.— John 20:30-31.

These words describe the chief purpose of the Gospel according to St. John, considered as a narrative of the life of Jesus. In their effect, though not by their position, they form the author’s explanatory preface to the whole book, because they assert the reason why he wrote, and indicate the kind of result he anticipated for the readers of his work.

This text, then, is nothing less than St. John’s own statement and summary of the object of his Gospel. We read the Gospels; page by page, verse by verse, we profit by their Divine teachings; but it is a blessed thought to have been told in one single verse the central intent why the last and most spiritual of them was written. That intent, the Evangelist tells us, was to produce in us a twofold conviction, and to enable us to enjoy the life which springs from its continuous power. The first conviction which he aims at forming in us is that Jesus is the Christ; the second, that Christ Jesus is the Son of God; and the fruit of that twofold conviction is the eternal life which is inspired by such a faith.

The living testimony of one who has “seen and touched and handled,” retains its unique charm and value across the flight of time. The custody of the museum at Bologna, in which are preserved the relics and trophies of the “Risorgimento,” is committed to an old Garibaldian veteran, who loves his charges with a real fatherly love—the torn uniforms and rusted and battered swords, the little scraps of writing, stained and crumpled, proclamations, letters, sonnets. But, above all, he loves the relics of Ugo Bassi—the devoted Barnabite, who inspired this national crusade as Peter the Hermit had fired men centuries before to fight the battles of Christendom. The priest who was content to stand apart from his fellows, and toil and suffer and die for the cause of Truth and Justice: the man whom the heroes of ’48 revered and loved, as St. Francis of old had been revered and loved—almost like Christ Himself come down again. One may read in books, or one may hear from the lips of a young professor who has studied history more widely and scientifically, a fascinating account of the events of ’48 and ’49. But there comes a peculiar thrill, a peculiar feeling of real touch with the facts, when the relics of Ugo Bassi are shown by one who as a boy heard that voice ring out in the Piazza, and saw a whole city stirred, as the light of those wonderful eyes pierced through them, and they stood in the grip of a soul that spoke in face and gesture as well as in the music of audible appeal. The martyrdom has a new meaning for us, as such an one relates how he saw the wearied form drawn through the streets and out at the gate of Sant’ Isaia amid the hated white uniforms; and heard the shots fired which proclaimed that the last agony was over. No; one who can say, “I saw, I touched, I handled,” even after the lapse of many years, still draws us, still makes the past live for us as none other Song of Solomon 1 [Note: Lonsdale Ragg, Christ and Our Ideals, 15.]

I

The Omitted and the Recorded Signs

St. John has recorded only a part of what he knows, and he has recorded this for a special purpose. He and his friends have lived through a great experience; they have been forced to consider what it really meant, and they have come to certain conclusions. Among all the events which passed under their eyes there were some that seemed specially significant. They were not merely events, they were signs; and that means that they had, as it were, two sides. On the one side something happened in the world of sight and sound—there was an historical occurrence. The Man Jesus did certain things in the world, just as Pontius Pilate the Governor, or Caiaphas the High Priest, or one of the Apostles themselves might have done. In a sense, of course, all such action has a significance, is, in some degree, a sign. Pilate, no doubt, has means of showing that what he does has behind it the force of the Roman Empire, which he represents. Perhaps Caiaphas revealed his high-priestly prerogative when, with the very last flicker of the old light that once shone upon the high priesthood, “he spake not of himself” of the necessity that one man should be sacrificed for the sake of the whole nation. Though the old gift was so sadly misused, it was still the High Priest in that predestined year who noted, cynically and brutally enough, the necessity of the sacrifice. And so Jesus did signs in the presence of His disciples, acts which carried meaning. Those who lived with Him gradually came to interpret these signs, and they drew from them the conviction that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing we have life in His Name. They commend their faith to others. It is their mission to go and make disciples throughout the world, and they use for the groundwork of their appeal not argument, not philosophical construction, but a recital of the events, which they had come to know as signs.

1. The signs of Jesus are largely unrecorded. “Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this bonk.” What is our first thought on being told this? Is it not this: Oh if we could only know them; if only they had been written down, what a priceless boon; they would be just what we most need, they would clear up so many points that are now tangled in dispute. For, indeed, the recorded doings and sayings of the Lord are so pitifully, so terribly, short—just a few rapid incidents thrown together in the Synoptics, mainly out of the very last year of His life—only twenty days of all His earthly career touched upon in St. John! How scanty, how partial, how unsatisfying! Was ever so tremendous a venture as the Christian creed made on so slight a foundation as this?

2. The unwritten is, and ever must be, more than the written. You cannot transcribe with pen all deeds and achievements, or tabulate the work of a life or even that of a year. Divine things cannot be compressed within the limits of a book. That which can be written can be circumscribed, and that which can be circumscribed has limits. Man looks for the unlimited, which may here be used for the infinite; and who would think of cramming the infinite into a report? There are always the “many other signs which are not written” in all God’s works and in all our works for God.

In examining and preparing the statistical returns for the year I was much struck with the thought of the “unwritten.” I looked at circuits where I know a pure Gospel has been preached and special services have been held, and yet I noticed that the number of those “admitted during the year” might be counted upon the fingers of my right hand. I am certain such a tabulation does not fully express the work or the fruit of a year. The other day I received a handbill as a specimen of “invisible printing.” On it were two blank spaces. I was instructed to hold the bill to the fire, and legible type would appear in the “blanks.” I acted upon the said instructions, and lo! there was the type perfectly readable. Brethren, in making up your returns I doubt not you mourned over the blank spaces; but when the record of our life and work shall be held up to the light and warmth of heaven we shall be cheered by seeing many a space “filled in” with the record of souls saved and saints succoured through our ministry. If all the signs of Christ’s ministry are not written, let us not complain if some of ours remain unrecorded. 1 [Note: M. Brokenshire.]

3. We are not on the track of St. John’s mind, when we begin by craving for an indefinite accumulation of Gospel material. He does not consider that that is what we need. He has another purpose in view, as he writes, than that of recording everything that he could recall or discover about our Lord, and this purpose of his is better served by a selection than by an accumulation, and therefore he spends his energy and experience not in gathering, but in sifting. His effort lies in singling out from the swarm of memories those special and typical moments which will best convey the impression he desires. How different from such a man as Papias in the later days, who had never seen the Lord, but would go about all over the world asking everywhere for some one who could tell him some new story about the Lord. That is not the Apostle, his long tarrying has taught him through the selective working of the Holy Spirit, under the pressure of daily circumstances what to keep in store, what to drop and prune, if the image of Christ is to transmit itself with faithful emphasis to those who are to come after. To secure this he depends, not on the quantity, but on the quality, of the matter chosen. We know, even in his own case, that the years as they pass over him have taught him the same lesson—to pare down rather than to expand. Fewer and fewer words, we are told by St. John, have become necessary to him; he would rather repeat and repeat those familiar phrases, into which he had concentrated all his love, than search about for other and more varied expressions.

To get at the heart and the mind of a person we turn to the characteristic deeds and words which come from him at the most cardinal and critical moments of his life. We can afford to omit, forget, a thousand details if only we can single out and fasten upon those peculiar, those unique, expressions which have upon them the special stamp of his individuality. It is the typical facts that we require when the fullest secret of His being emerged and flashed. To know Him, then, at such vivid moments, is to know Him for ever, for it is to know Him as He is. A multitude of minor events and records would be full of interest, no doubt, but they would not be essential, they would not really add to our knowledge, they would but corroborate and confirm it. Take the case of a dear friend passed away from us in death. What is it that lives in our faithful memory of him, what is it we love to bring up in imagination and brood over and caress, as it were, with an affectionate recollection? Not, I think, a quantity of details, but rather, I think, the few singular and intimate and memorable characteristics which marked him out from all others, the things which gave him his personal uniqueness, the things which no one else could have done or said, the points at which his innermost nature shot up to the surface, and looked out at us with a sudden intensity, before it fell back again under the veil of ordinary existence. Certain single moments there have been that abide in our mind when he turned his face full upon us—the man himself; certain actions there were that stand out clear from all others as stars in the night. They may be great or little, but they were the windows through which we saw into his soul. Perhaps it is the ring of his voice on a certain phrase that will haunt us; or the turn of his head, as he looked back and smiled; his gait, as we caught sight of him some day, that we remember so well; or that way he had of laying his hand on our arm, and we can feel it warm there to-day; or the sort of word he used, that was a favourite one on his lips, the word that was the key to so much in him in which we delighted; or some one happy day, when the blessed home was full of his delightful presence; or, above all, the tune of his laugh when he was merry, or the look in his eyes at the time of some deep sorrow—these are the things that we cling to, and to these and no more than these. 1 [Note: H. Scott Holland.]

4. But, besides the fact that a selection of signs is more impressive than an accumulation of them, there is another reason why St. John selects the few signs and omits the many. Because Jesus Christ is still alive and at work; Jesus Christ is a living Person, ascended to the right hand of God, reigning in the midst of His Church. He, through His Spirit, is here ready to meet difficulties as they arise, ready to answer the questions suggested by His words, ready to lead His believers on and on in the path on which they have set out. All the Christian religion lies in that; it lies in the actual communion between the living soul and the living Christ, not in reading about Him, not in hearing about Him, not in remembering things that He did, or being convinced that He really did them, or in admiration for His historical character, or in approving the excellence of His teaching, or in a touching sentiment from the beautiful drama once enacted by Him “who for us men, and for our salvation came down … and was made man”—not in any of these does the religion of Christ consist. It begins and ends wholly in an active and energetic contact between the Person of Jesus Christ and the person of His followers.

If we have not the realized presence of Christ, nothing can bring us together; if we have it, nothing can keep us apart. 2 [Note: Charles A. Berry, 127.]

“Who is it that is passing by?” A personal presence? It is enigmatical enough; it is bewildering, it amazes, it says but few things plainly. But there it is; we cannot escape it; it is a presence which is not to be put by. That is its challenge: it stands there delivering the challenge by its sheer existence—not by arguments, not by explanation, not by persuasion. Not by those weapons does it make its attack; no, but by being simply what it is. “I am what I am, I am that which I have been telling you.” “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” That is the voice that speaks through the written records, speaks as none other ever spoke. And it is the voice of a living man, not of a book, using a book through which to speak, but Himself the key of the written word, Himself the power in the book; Himself the argument, the appeal; Himself the soul of the record! Though all the books that the world could contain were written about Him the situation would still be the same. At the close when you have read them all, the one question would still remain to be answered: “After all you have read, after all you have heard, will you follow Me? Will you obey Me? Will you trust Me? Will you put your souI in My hands?” 1 [Note: H. Scott Holland.]

II

The Purpose of the Signs

St. John tells that having selected certain signs for record he has written his Gospel for a purpose. The purpose is twofold: first, that we may believe that Jesus is the Christ or Messiah and the Son of God; and then that, so believing, we may have life in His name. Let us consider (1) what we are to believe—that Jesus is the Christ, and that He is the Son of God; (2) how the signs enable us thus to believe; and (3) the effect of our belief—life in His name.

1. What does the Apostle, in writing this Gospel, want us to believe? He brings before us One Jesus, and he desires to prove that He is the Christ or promised Messiah and the Son of God.

(1) Jesus.—Who can narrate all that that name has been, all that it is, to those who have known it? “Jesus” is the subject of the four Gospels. Their one subject is the Life of Jesus. It is the Lord’s human name; the name by which His mother called Him, when He lay as an infant in the manger cradle, when He played as a little child on the cottage floor of Nazareth; the name of Him who was the village carpenter; the name of

Him who wont to stray

A pilgrim on the world’s highway,

Oppressed by power, and mocked by pride,

The Nazarene, the Crucified.

As we utter it we recall the scenes in the Synagogue and the Temple; the sermon on the hillside among the lilies of the field; the boat stirred gently by the silver ripples of the lake; the feeding of the multitudes as they sat in their many-coloured Eastern robes on the green grass; the woman sobbing at His feet and wiping them with the hairs of her head at the banquet of the Pharisee; the long night of prayer upon the lonely hill; the life as an excommunicated fugitive with a price upon His head; the madness of priests and scribes against the only human life ever lived of perfect love and sinless innocence; the fury of the mob; the last supper; the disciple who became the traitor; the agony in Gethsemane; the cross; the garden grave.

The designation “Jesus” gives Him a place in the history of the world, allocates and identifies Him with men, and forms a useful starting-point for all inquiries concerning His character. At once we meet with Him on the plane of human life, in the midst of the known and the knowable, a man like ourselves, grafted on the stock of common humanity, and in most essential respects identical with us. His name was not an unfamiliar one at the beginning of the present era. There was nothing strange in it to the ears of His companions in the streets of Nazareth. Betokening Him through whom Jehovah sends salvation, it had passed into common circulation, and was often represented by the Greek Jason. In the list of seventy-two commissioners sent by Eleazer to Ptolemy, it is found twice. One of the books of the Apocrypha is attributed to Jesus the son of Sirach. A companion of St. Paul’s at Rome was Jesus, surnamed Justus. According to St. Matthew the name was given to the Son of Mary because it fitly described the work He was destined to accomplish for men.

Certainly events have justified the prophecy uttered in the name. St. John regarded it, as appears from his First Epistle as well as from this Gospel, as fixing the real human personality of his Lord. It chronicled and reported the fact that He was made a little lower than the angels, that He had a manhood as veritable as our own. His name was not Gabriel or Michael, but Jesus—a common, human, historic name, fitting well the man whose place in the successions of the race of men it registers. “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” “He was made of a woman, made under the law.” His human nature was real. There was nothing simulated or abridged about Him. He was the fulness of humanity in its depth and height, length and breadth. No one was ever more human than Jesus. Never was one so completely and thoroughly man as He! 1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian Certainties, 165.]

(2) Christ.—The object of the Gospel was to teach us that this Jesus was the Christ—that is, the Anointed, the promised Messiah of the Jews. As He is the strength of all the present, so was He the fulfilment of all the past. God, who loved His human children unto the end, loved them from the beginning. The Incarnation was no sudden thought; no second-best plan. It was the consummation of that love of God of which He had not left Himself without witness from the foundation of the world. We have an Old Testament as well as a New Testament. We are one in hope, one in promise with all the forefathers of our race. When men fell, the promise was given; when the Deluge came, it was renewed; it was confirmed to Abraham and to his sons; it gleamed through the thunder-smoke of Sinai; it brightened the De profundis of the Jewish people in the Psalms; it is the divinest tone in the grandest utterances of all the prophets. The object of the Evangelists in teaching that Jesus is the Christ is to convince us that this Son of man was the promised seed of the woman who should bruise the serpent’s head; that He was the true rainbow of the Covenant; that in Him were all the nations of the world to be blessed; that He was the Prophet greater than Moses of whom Moses spoke; that He was the true Star of Jacob, the Sceptre of Israel; the King of David’s line; the branch of the stem of Jesse; the oppressed and afflicted but not for Himself; the King upon His throne; the Priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.

From the beginning of His ministry the Nazarene was familiar with the idea of His Messiahship as involving service and suffering, and gave no indistinct signs of the force with which it possessed Him. He is a true Hebrew in hope and faith. He reads the Law, sings the Psalms, and is fired by the Messiah hope. On His acceptance of the office of Scripture-reader in the synagogue of His native village He appropriated the Messianic words of Isaiah as descriptive of Himself. To the Samaritan woman He made known His character, and affirmed that He was the Messiah expected by the people; and such was the beauty of His life and the power of His words, that after He had been but two days in Sychar many said to the woman, “Now we believe, not because of thy speaking: for we have heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.” 1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian Certainties, 174.]

(3) Son of God.—We must advance one step further. Jesus is the Son of God. He who could claim to be in so supreme and distinguishing a sense the Son of Man without deserving the charge of insanity or overweening self-conceit, and to be the Messiah, the anointed prophet-king of the Most High, without refutation from the cleverest and bitterest of His foes, need not hesitate to urge His right to be regarded as the Son of God. This is the fundamental fact in His consciousness. Directly and intuitively He knows His own Sonship, and speaks and acts by the final and supreme authority of that unique relation. We must, therefore, complete the synthesis of facts grouped in the words “Jesus” and “Christ” in another and higher designation: and what can that be but the Son of God the Father! The circumstances of the case demand and fully justify the triple name for the Galilean Teacher, our Lord Jesus Christ.

When Jesus named Himself the Son of God before the religious Jews, the only interpretation they could put upon His words was, that He was setting Himself up as a rival God, “making himself equal with God.” It is interesting and instructive to observe how Jesus passes by the word equal, in order that He may expound and dwell upon His perfect filial unity with His Father. He entirely disavows the equality in the sense in which the Jews meant it; and so St. Paul says of Him, that He did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped at. It was impossible to imagine a more complete subordination than that of the Son of God to the Father. Mark once more those wonderful sayings of Jesus: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.” What language could more explicitly repudiate any independent equality of the Son with the Father? But then our Lord adds the assertion, “What things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” Such a relation as this might not unnaturally be expressed by the term equality. But if we follow our blessed Lord’s own teaching, we shall make sonship—sonship in its most perfect idea, eternal sonship—the key to what He was and is at the side of the Father. Jesus did not shrink from saying that it was the Father’s purpose that “all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father.” 1 [Note: J. Ll. Davies, The Manifestation of the Son of God, 46.]

They come to Thee, the halt, the maimed, the blind,

The devil-torn, the sick, the sore;

Thy heart their well of life they find,

Thine ear their open door.

Ah! who can tell the joy in Palestine—

What smiles and tears of rescued throngs!

Their lees of life were turned to wine,

Their prayers to shouts and songs!

The story dear our wise men fable call,

Give paltry facts the mighty range;

To me it seems just what should fall,

And nothing very strange.

But were I deaf and lame and blind and sore,

I scarce would care for cure to ask;

Another prayer should haunt Thy door—

Set Thee a harder task.

If Thou art Christ, see here this heart of mine,

Torn, empty, moaning, and unblest!

Had ever heart more need of Thine,

If Thine indeed hath rest?

Thy word, Thy hand right soon did scare the bane

That in their bodies death did breed;

If Thou can’st cure my deeper pain,

Then art Thou Lord indeed.

2. Now, how do the signs which St. John has selected enable us to believe that Jesus is the Christ and the Son of God?

(1) What is belief? There are two words in this Gospel which are very frequently used. The first is the word “believe,” and the second the word “witness.” Men are asked to believe in Jesus. “To those that believe” is the promise of the Gospel given. The writer does not say that the mystery of Jesus Christ is made manifest to the clever and the wise; he does not say that the secret of Jesus Christ is declared even to those who simply seek it; but he does say that it is made manifest to him who believes. That is the challenge which the Person of Jesus Christ still throws out. It is “whosoever believeth.” That with us has become almost a cant phrase. It is an easy kind of thing to say in a sermon or at a revival meeting, but there is a meaning behind it, and we need to get back to the original and true meaning. To believe in Jesus Christ is to do something more than think about Him and to have an opinion concerning Him. It means to bow before Him in reverence; to take Him at His word; to do His will; to begin walking in His way; to make the great surrender; to accept His teaching as though it were true, and prove it true by practising it. The man who so deals with Christ is the man who in the end finds out His secret and is able to say, “My Lord and my God.” He then becomes a witness to His name. What he has found in Jesus Christ for himself, he is constrained to make known to others. “He believes and therefore also he speaks.”

It is sometimes asked, Why can I not be saved without faith? I answer, Look to this text and see the reason. Is a man saved who knows nothing of Christ and of God in Him, who indeed refuses this knowledge? It is an impossibility. Salvation lies in the very thing that you seek to get without it. Knowledge of Christ, likeness to Christ, sympathy with Christ: this is salvation; and how can it exist without knowing Him and believing in Him? Go and get health without wholeness, sanity without being sane, and fulness without being filled, and you may have salvation without faith, i.e. salvation without salvation. Faith makes all the difference between Heaven and Hell, not by a mere act of God’s will, but by the very nature of the case. You must enter at this strait gate, if you are ever to enter at all; for there is only one Heaven, that where Christ is believed in, loved, and glorified; and you cannot think of any life for sinners there, which is not through His name. 1 [Note: John Cairns, Christ the Morning Star, 304.]

Faith is no common word as the embodiment and expression of a Divine principle, and I do not think we have reached by far its lofty heights, or barely touched even the fringes of its sacred mantle, or caught the breath of its pure life, or felt the charm of its healing touch. I should like to be able to explain the full, deep meaning of this word, but I cannot. I look at it subjectively and objectively. Subjectively, it is God’s gift to man and in man; yes, but it is more. It becomes a part of our best life, and a ruling, purifying part, for it controls and permeates the whole man. Do I err in suggesting that faith is the human counterpart, or that which answers in man, to omniscience in God? As omniscience is the eye of Deity, so faith is the eye of the soul; hence knowledge and life come by a look. God has no faith because He knows all things and needs it not; we do not know all, but the point or power in us which reaches nearest to the all-knowing is faith. Sight has limitations in the objective as well as in the subjective. Faith is limited in the subjective only—it has an infinite objective. Sight has to do solely with the material, faith with the spiritual. Sight is of the body, faith is of the soul. 1 [Note: M. Brokenshire.]

(2) How do the signs of Jesus produce faith in Him? St. John felt that the life of Christ had a perpetual value for men. The Lord Jesus was not an ordinary person, had not an ordinary career, and therefore ought not to have an ordinary fate. He was not a simple mortal with common relations to the past, and without any legacies for posterity; but One who gathered into Himself all the nobility and worth of preceding times as into a focus, and was fitted to become the fountain of strength and life for men through succeeding ages. The Son of Man had touched with His sympathetic hand and unrivalled powers the whole circle of human life, and invested every object therein with unfading beauty and exceeding grace. His “signs” spoke to the sorrows and griefs of men, and are eminently worthy of the opportunity of repeating their messages to the care-burdened heart as long as man may open his ears for words from the Unseen. His “sayings” contained truths so original, and yet so pertinent to all that concerns the true progress of man, that no age ought to be without their illuminating presence. His perfect goodness, embodying in the fullest degree the Christian idea of holiness which He had created, was such that it would have been an irreparable injury to have been bereft of the story which enshrined His portrait. The redemptive work He accomplished was so freighted with the best gifts of our heavenly Father to His erring children that to bring it into human literature, and make it contemporary with every age, was to set wide open the door of Heaven and lead men to walk therein; therefore these things were written, that men may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing they may have life in His name.

John the Baptist having been in prison for several months, and becoming anxious concerning the establishment of the visible dominion of which he supposed he had been the pioneer, sent two of his disciples to Jesus with the question, “Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?” The reply of Christ claimed the Messiah’s office and character on incontestable grounds. “Tell John,” said He, “My miracles are wrought amongst the poor in spirit and in goods. I give gladness to the desponding, and joy to the sad. I am the messenger of glad tidings to the people, and blessed is he who is not offended at the mode in which I work, or repulsed by the strongest evidences of my anointing of God.” 1 [Note: John Clifford, The Christian, Certainties, 175.]

In the Synoptic Gospels our Lord deals mainly with great moral and spiritual principles. He interprets the aim and inner meaning of the old law, deals with the nature of religion, and scarcely touches on His own personal claims. In St. John the prevailing subject is Himself, His relations to God, to His disciples, and to the unbelieving world. It is in St. John alone, for example, that we read of Christ’s sayings, “I am the bread of life”; “the light of the world”; “the door”; “the good shepherd “; “the resurrection and the life”; “the true vine”; “the way, the truth, and the life.” No reader fails to feel the difference. There is a difference also in the object of the miracles recorded. Not only is there in St. John’s Gospel what Dr. Sanday calls “an enhancement of the miraculous,” but their object is different. In St. John the miracle appears to be a manifestation of Divine power in order to induce belief, rather than, as in the others, a work of compassion, contingent on faith in the person healed. 2 [Note: J. M. Wilson, The Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 89.]

Our Lord, during the three years of His ministry, had given extraordinary signs of omnipotence as credentials of His Divine mission. St. John makes a judicious and characteristic selection of seven of them, five of which are peculiar to his Gospel. He apparently designed to supplement the Synoptic Gospels by these additional supernatural details, although his main purpose throughout was to put in prominence the Divine side of the Person of Christ, “The Lamb of God.” Note attentively the symbolic import of these seven “signs.”

(1) At Cana He turned the water into wine, figuring to spiritual minds the transformation of the old and weak into the new and strong, the transfiguration of earthly things and relationships by the new spirit of grace.

(2) At Capernaum, Christ’s power of life was declared, whilst the beauty and virtue of faith was illustrated in the nobleman who at the Saviour’s word believed in his son’s cure.

(3) The real perennial fount of life was further shown by the cure of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda. The Father, the absolute soul, communicates all healing and life-giving powers to men by the Son, who is thus the proximate source. “As the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”

(4) By the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, Jesus manifested Himself to be the sustainer and nourisher of man’s life. This miracle gives point to the pregnant words, “Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life,” and to His discourses upon the manna, the type and symbol of Himself, “the true bread which cometh down from heaven, of which if a man eat he shall live for ever.”

(5) The winds and waves, too, are here, as in the Synoptic Gospels, represented as obeying His nod. As the Lord of the forces of nature He treads upon the wings of the storm, to the consternation of His disciples.

(6) A man blind from birth who receives sight, to the delightful amazement of his friends and to the confusion of enemies, presents symbolically an illustrious concrete demonstration of the fact that Jesus Christ is the Giver of light, “the light of every man coming into the world.”

(7) The raising of Lazarus, already in a state of putrefaction, fitly sets the Lord forth as “the resurrection and the life.” Hear His own words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live.” Again, “marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.”

The succession of these seven characteristic signs leads up to the crowning tragedy, and the Lord’s own glorious victory over death. 1 [Note: J. Miller, Sermons Literary and Scientific, 1st Ser., 20.]

3. What, finally, is the ultimate effect of believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God? St. John’s answer is, that we may have life in His name.

The name of Christ, of course, stands for the power of Christ. We express that even in our hymns.

His name the sinner hears,

And is from sin set free,

’Tis music in his ears,

’Tis life and victory.

New songs shall now his lips employ,

And dances his glad heart for joy.

(1) It is worthy of notice that even the lowest kind of life, that which is merely physical and earthly, is helped by the history, example, and influence of Jesus Christ. He Himself blessed men’s bodies, as a kind of image of, and preparation for, the deeper blessing He had in reserve for their souls. Now the Church continues this work and, though not armed with His power of miracle, is doing more at this day than ever was done before to preserve, enlarge, and bless the mere physical life of man. It is doing more than all other remedial agencies to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and to strike at the very roots of all the sins and vices which wear out life and induce decay and death. Take Christ away, out of the Gospels and out of the world, and you see how, as He goes out, death comes in. In heathen lands you light again the widow’s pile, and restore infanticide; and nearer home you give a new license to intemperance and to lust; you break down the law of the Sabbath, and doom the millions to be ground in endless labour. You give a fresh lease to war, with no Christ-like face to come between the combatants and stay their fury. You urge on suicide by making life more miserable and less sacred. You introduce at every point some element of death, and your gospel is simply “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” Such is the best hope of unbelief, such the millennium which secularism in its blindness and against its will is seeking to introduce.

I ascribe my long life under God to my abstaining from the use of intoxicating liquors, and general observance of the laws of health. No doubt my habitual state of mind has had a great influence on my bodily health. My strong confidence in my God and the peace and joy I have felt, springing from an abiding evidence of my acceptance with Him, have tended to promote health and length of days. 1 [Note: C. Chiniquy, Forty Years in the Church of Christ, 476.]

(2) But while Christ thus retrieves, conserves, and exalts the life that now is, His greatest blessing is the life that is spiritual, begun here and gloriously prolonged in the life to come. There is the life of knowledge, according to Christ’s own words, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.” There is the life of pardon, where the condemned sinner receives a legal title to live, through the Lord our Righteousness. There is the life of regeneration and sanctification, whereby those who were dead in trespasses and sins rise with Christ and walk in newness of life. There is the life of eternal blessedness, which is the consummation of all the rest, according to the promise, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.”

I do not think we mark sufficiently the traces of autobiography in the sacred writers. The favourite word of St. John is “life.” He dwells upon it more than on any other conception. And it seems to me that there is great appropriateness in the selection. To the men of his generation he was essentially the man of life. He had so much vitality about him that his contemporaries said he would never die. He says himself that if a man had in him the Spirit of Christ he would have in him the spirit of immortal youth, or what he calls Eternal Life. Where did he get that conception? From his own experience. He felt every morning as if he were born afresh into the world. He felt something within him like the springing up of living waters. Nay, he felt as if he had already passed the rubicon of death and had even now entered the world of the immortals. I think if you and I had met St. John the thing that would have impressed us above all other things would have been the vitality of his spirit. We see this manifestation exhibited in some of our fellow-men. There are those whom we describe as “full of life”; and if you ask the source of this life you will find that in every case it is originated by something outside. St. John says that in his case the flow of vitality came from the name of Jesus. The flow of vitality always comes from a human interest, and is generally awakened by a name. The names “liberty,” “equality,” “fraternity,” stimulated the French Revolution—a vital force that shook the world. Many a heart has been vitalized by a name. You sit in a crowded drawing-room and hear a buzz of inarticulate voices. Suddenly, a voice not louder than the rest becomes articulate; it pronounces a name, a name you love. “Have you heard he is coming home?” Before that name broke upon your ear you were listless, apathetic, dead. But when you heard the prophecy of its owner’s advent, a new life rose within you. The eye sparkled; the cheek mantled; the pulse quickened; the room became radiant; the languor vanished; the hours received wings. Even such to the beloved disciple was the mention of the name of Jesus. It made him young again—nay, rather it kept him from ever growing old. It constituted him an evergreen; it gave him life eternal. It not only prolonged his years; it made them perpetual spring—elastic with energy, bounding with hope, buoyant with the promise of to-morrow. It retained within him the heart of a child. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, 73.]

The Chief Purpose of the Gospel

Literature

Cairns (J.), Christ the Morning Star, 290.

Clifford (J.), The Christian Certainties, 159.

Davies (J. Ll.), The Manifestation of the Son of God, 32.

Drummond (J.), Spiritual Religion, 40.

Farrar (F. W.), Truths to Live By, 1.

Hall (E. H.), Discourses, 78.

Ragg (L.), Christ and Our Ideals, 1.

Selbie (W. B.), Aspects of Christ, 95.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xxvii. No. 1631.

Stalker (J.), The Two St. Johns, 169.

Stryker (M. W.), The Well by the Gate, 43.

Wilson (J. M.), Studies in the Origins and Aims of the Four Gospels, 85.

Christian Commonwealth, March 1, 1911 (Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, xxxvi. 168 (Brokenshire); xli. 339 (Scott Holland); lxiii. 262 (Mitchell).

Guardian, June 16, 1911 (Strong).

Literary Churchman, xvii. 454.

Treasury, xxii, 263 (Welcher).