THE SHEPHERD’S LOVE FOR THE SCATTERED FLOCK
I pray not that Thou shouldest take them from the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil one. - John 17:15
The necessities and dangers of the friends of Christ made His love specially tender. "He loved His own which were in the world." And so loving them, "loved them to the uttermost."
We have, running through these precious discourses recorded by John, many allusions to the separation which was to ensue, and to His leaving His followers in circumstances of peculiar peril, defenseless and solitary. " I come unto Thee, and am no more in the world," says He in the final high-priestly prayer, "but these are in the world." "Holy Father! keep them through Thine own Name." The same contrast between the certain security of the Shepherd and the troubled perils of the scattered flock seems to be in the words just quoted (John 13:1), and suggests a sweet and blessed reason for the special tenderness with which He looked upon them. As a dying father on his deathbed may yearn over orphans that he is leaving defenseless, so Christ here is represented as conscious of an accession even to the tender longings of His heart when He thought of the loneliness and the dangers to which His followers were to be exposed.
Ah! it seems a strange contrast between the emperor sitting throned there between the purple curtains and the poor athletes wrestling in the arena below; it seems strange to think that a loving Master has gone up into the mountain, and has left His disciples to toil in rowing on the stormy sea of life; but the contrast is only apparent - for you and I, if we love and trust Him, are with Him in the heavenly places even whilst we toil here; and He is with us, working with us, even whilst He sitteth at the right hand of God.
We may be sure of this, that that love ever increases its manifestations according to our deepening necessities. The darker the night the more lustrous the stars. The deeper, the narrower, the savager the Alpine gorge, usually the fuller and the swifter the stream that runs through it. And the more enemies and fears gather round about us, the sweeter will be the accents of our Comforter’s voice, and the fuller will be the gifts of tenderness and grace with which He draws near to us. Our sorrows, dangers, necessities, are doors through which His love can come nigh.
So we have had experience of sweet and transient human love; we have had experience of changeable and ineffectual love. Turn away from them all to this immortal deep heart of Christ’s, welling over with a love which no change can affect, which no separation can diminish, which no sin can provoke, which becomes greater and tenderer as our necessities increase; and ask Him to fill your hearts with that, that you may know the length and breadth and depth and height of that love which passeth knowledge, and so be filled with all the fulness of God.